ndly of my loss.

He told me how my love was dead;
He was not the first!
Broadcast our land the word of dread
Told women the worst.
They say, let love and light be given
So we keep Liberty;
But I say there is no more Heaven
If men must so be free.

xi

Can it be own'd that kings were crown'd,
Consecrate to such evil?
God-appointed, by God anointed
Only to play the devil!
Their men to bind of the tiger kind,
To bind and then to goad,
Blundering, slavering, hot and blind,
On murder's hollow road?

If kings are so, then let all go--
Let my dear love cast down
His lovely life, so we lay low
The last to wear a crown.
I'll look upon the steadfast stars,
Patient and true and wise,
And read in them the end of wars,
As in my dead love's eyes.

O Lord of Life, for whom this earth
Should image back Thy thought,
Wherein the mystery of birth
In Love like Thine be wrought,
If pity stands with Thy commands,
Grant a short breathing-space
Ere men hold up their bloody hands
Before Thy awful face.

Note

This poem is dramatic, and I am not to be supposed answerable for all
that it expresses; nevertheless I think that my own convictions about
aggressive war are very much those of my Village Wife. Of defensive war,
of war to save the lives of our children, of war to save humanity
itself, there cannot be two sane opinions: that is a pious duty forced
upon us; but it becomes every day more inconceivable to me how men can
engage in the other kind of war, and how, in particular, a people so
provident as the German people could have hoodwinked themselves into
believing that they could be better off by such a monstrous means as
warfare has now become. They had behind them the experience of the
Russians and Japanese; they had all about them the evidences of their
forty years' commercial activity; they must have known, or at least
their governors must have known, what kind of results might be looked
for from modern armament--and yet they dared risk the dereliction of
human morality, the cutting off of a generation of men, and their own
national bankruptcy. Whether it was the madness of lust, or of pride, or
of fear, it was a madness which has procured the greatest disaster of
recorded time, and revealed a criminal folly in themselves which