smitest at shadows, black shadows of blood that is red
In the face of a soulless putrescence, doomed, damned, deflowered and dead;
Oh, robed in the rags of thy raging, like tempests that thunder afar,
In a night that is fashioned of Chaos discerned in the light of a star,
For the verse that is venom and vapour, discrowned and disowned of the free,
Take thou from the shape that is Murder, none other will thank thee, thy fee.
Yea, Freedom is throned on the Mountains; the cry of her children seems vain
When they fall and are ground into dust by the heel of the lords of the plain.
Calm-browed from her crags she beholdeth the strife and the struggle beneath.
And her hand clasps the hilt, but it draws not the sword of her might from its sheath.
And we chide her aloud in our anguish, "Cold mother, and careless of wrong,
How long shall the victims be torn unavenged, unavenging? How long?"
And the laugh of oppressors is scornful, they reck not of ruth as they urge
The hosts that are tireless in torture, the fiends with the chain and the scourge,
But at last--for she knoweth the season--serene she descends from the height,
And the tyrants who flout her grow pale in her sunrise, and pray for the night.
And they tremble and dwindle before her amazed, and, behold, with a breath,
Unhasting, unangered advancing, she dooms them to terror and death.
But she the great mother of heroes, the shield and the sword of the weak,
What lot or what part has her glory in madmen who gibber and shriek?
Her eye is as death to assassins, the brood of miasma and gloom,
Foul shapes that grow sleek upon slaughter, as worms that are hid in a tomb.
In the dawn she has marshalled her armies, the millions go marching as one,
With a tramp that is fearless as joy, and a joy that is bright as the sun.
But the minions of Murder move softly; unseen they have crept from their lair,
In a night that is darker than doom on the famishing face of despair.
And they lurk and they tremble and cower, and stab as they lurk from behind,
Like shapes from a pit Acherontic by hatred and horror made blind.
These are not the soldiers of Freedom; the hearts of her lovers grow faint
When the name of assassin is chanted as one with the name of a saint.
And thou the pale poet of Passion, who art wanton to strike and to kill,
Lest her wrath and her splendour abash thee and scorch thee and crush thee, be still.

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