The Pilgrims of Hope Read online

  As oft in the calm of dawning I have heard the birds rejoice,

  As oft I have heard the storm-wind go moaning through the wood,

  And I knew that earth was speaking, and the mother's voice was good.

  Now, to thee alone will I tell it that thy mother's body is fair,

  In the guise of the country maidens who play with the sun and the air,

  Who have stood in the row of the reapers in the August afternoon,

  Who have sat by the frozen water in the highday of the moon,

  When the lights of the Christmas feasting were dead in the house on the hill,

  And the wild geese gone to the salt marsh had left the winter still.

  Yea, I am fair, my firstling; if thou couldst but remember me!

  The hair that thy small hand clutcheth is a goodly sight to see;

  I am true, but my face is a snare; soft and deep are my eyes,

  And they seem for men's beguiling fulfilled with the dreams of the wise.

  Kind are my lips, and they look as though my soul had learned

  Deep things I have never heard of. My face and my hands are burned

  By the lovely sun of the acres; three months of London-town

  And thy birth-bed have bleached them indeed-"But lo, where the edge of the gown"

  (So said thy father one day) "parteth the wrist white as curd

  From the brown of the hands that I love, bright as the wing of a bird."

  Such is thy mother, O firstling, yet strong as the maidens of old,

  Whose spears and whose swords were the warders of homestead, of field and of fold.

  Oft were my feet on the highway, often they wearied the grass;

  From dusk unto dusk of the summer three times in a week would I pass

  To the downs from the house on the river through the waves of the blossoming corn.

  Fair then I lay down in the even, and fresh I arose on the morn,

  And scarce in the noon was I weary. Ah, son, in the days of thy strife,

  If thy soul could harbour a dream of the blossom of my life!

  It would be as sunlit meadows beheld from a tossing sea,

  And thy soul should look on a vision of the peace that is to be.

  Yet, yet the tears on my cheek! And what is this doth move

  My heart to thy heart, beloved, save the flood of yearning love?

  For fair and fierce is thy father, and soft and strange are his eyes

  That look on the days that shall be with the hope of the brave and the wise.

  It was many a day that we laughed as over the meadows we walked,

  And many a day I hearkened and the pictures came as he talked;

  It was many a day that we longed, and we lingered late at eve

  Ere speech from speech was sundered, and my hand his hand could leave.

  Then I wept when I was alone, and I longed till the daylight came;

  And down the stairs I stole, and there was our housekeeping dame

  (No mother of me, the foundling) kindling the fire betimes

  Ere the haymaking folk went forth to the meadows down by the limes;

  All things I saw at a glance; the quickening fire-tongues leapt

  Through the crackling heap of sticks, and the sweet smoke up from it crept,

  And close to the very hearth the low sun flooded the floor,

  And the cat and her kittens played in the sun by the open door.

  The garden was fair in the morning, and there in the road he stood

  Beyond the crimson daisies and the bush of southernwood.

  Then side by side together through the grey-walled place we went,

  And O the fear departed, and the rest and sweet content!

  Son, sorrow and wisdom he taught me, and sore I grieved and learned

  As we twain grew into one; and the heart within me burned

  With the very hopes of his heart. Ah, son, it is piteous,

  But never again in my life shall I dare to speak to thee thus;

  So may these lonely words about thee creep and cling,

  These words of the lonely night in the days of our wayfaring.

  Many a child of woman to-night is born in the town,

  The desert of folly and wrong; and of what and whence are they grown?

  Many and many an one of wont and use is born;

  For a husband is taken to bed as a hat or a ribbon is worn.

  Prudence begets her thousands: "Good is a housekeeper's life,

  So shall I sell my body that I may be matron and wife."

  "And I shall endure foul wedlock and bear the children of need."

  Some are there born of hate-many the children of greed.

  "I, I too can be wedded, though thou my love hast got."

  "I am fair and hard of heart, and riches shall be my lot."

  And all these are the good and the happy, on whom the world dawns fair.

  O son, when wilt thou learn of those that are born of despair,

  As the fabled mud of the Nile that quickens under the sun

  With a growth of creeping things, half dead when just begun?

  E'en such is the care of Nature that man should never die,

  Though she breed of the fools of the earth, and the dregs of the city sty.

  But thou, O son, O son, of very love wert born,

  When our hope fulfilled bred hope, and fear was a folly outworn;

  On the eve of the toil and the battle all sorrow and grief we weighed,

  We hoped and we were not ashamed, we knew and we were not afraid.

  Now waneth the night and the moon-ah, son, it is piteous

  That never again in my life shall I dare to speak to thee thus.

  But sure from the wise and the simple shall the mighty come to birth;

  And fair were my fate, beloved, if I be yet on the earth

  When the world is awaken at last, and from mouth to mouth they tell

  Of thy love and thy deeds and thy valour, and thy hope that nought can quell.

  NEW BIRTH

  It was twenty-five years ago that I lay in my mother's lap

  New born to life, nor knowing one whit of all that should hap:

  That day was I won from nothing to the world of struggle and pain,

  Twenty-five years ago-and to-night am I born again.

  I look and behold the days of the years that are passed away,

  And my soul is full of their wealth, for oft were they blithe and gay

  As the hours of bird and of beast: they have made me calm and strong

  To wade the stream of confusion, the river of grief and wrong.

  A rich man was my father, but he skulked ere I was born,

  And gave my mother money, but left her life to scorn;

  And we dwelt alone in our village: I knew not my mother's "shame,"

  But her love and her wisdom I knew till death and the parting came.

  Then a lawyer paid me money, and I lived awhile at a school,

  And learned the lore of the ancients, and how the knave and the fool

  Have been mostly the masters of earth: yet the earth seemed fair and good

  With the wealth of field and homestead, and garden and river and wood;

  And I was glad amidst it, and little of evil I knew

  As I did in sport and pastime such deeds as a youth might do,

  Who deems he shall live for ever. Till at last it befel on a day

  That I came across our Frenchman at the edge of the new-mown hay,

  A-fishing as he was wont, alone as he always was;

  So I helped the dark old man to bring a chub to grass,

  And somehow he knew of my birth, and somehow we came to be friends,

  Till he got to telling me chapters of the tale that never ends;

  The battle of grief and hope with riches and folly and wrong.

  He told how the weak conspire, he told of the fear of the strong;

  He told of dreams grown deeds, deeds done ere
time was ripe,

  Of hope that melted in air like the smoke of his evening pipe;

  Of the fight long after hope in the teeth of all despair;

  Of battle and prison and death, of life stripped naked and bare.

  But to me it all seemed happy, for I gilded all with the gold

  Of youth that believes not in death, nor knoweth of hope grown cold.

  I hearkened and learned, and longed with a longing that had no name,

  Till I went my ways to our village and again departure came.

  Wide now the world was grown, and I saw things clear and grim,

  That awhile agone smiled on me from the dream-mist doubtful and dim.

  I knew that the poor were poor, and had no heart or hope;

  And I knew that I was nothing with the least of evils to cope;

  So I thought the thoughts of a man, and I fell into bitter mood,

  Wherein, except as a picture, there was nought on the earth that was good;

  Till I met the woman I love, and she asked, as folk ask of the wise,

  Of the root and meaning of things that she saw in the world of lies.

  I told her all I knew, and the tale told lifted the load

  That made me less than a man; and she set my feet on the road.

  So we left our pleasure behind to seek for hope and for life,

  And to London we came, if perchance there smouldered the embers of strife

  Such as our Frenchman had told of; and I wrote to him to ask

  If he would be our master, and set the learners their task.

  But "dead" was the word on the letter when it came back to me,

  And all that we saw henceforward with our own eyes must we see.

  So we looked and wondered and sickened; not for ourselves indeed:

  My father by now had died, but he left enough for my need;

  And besides, away in our village the joiner's craft had I learned,

  And I worked as other men work, and money and wisdom I earned.

  Yet little from day to day in street or workshop I met

  To nourish the plant of hope that deep in my heart had been set.

  The life of the poor we learned, and to me there was nothing new

  In their day of little deeds that ever deathward drew.

  But new was the horror of London that went on all the while

  That rich men played at their ease for name and fame to beguile

  The days of their empty lives, and praised the deeds they did,

  As though they had fashioned the earth and found out the sun long hid;

  Though some of them busied themselves from hopeless day to day

  With the lives of the slaves of the rich and the hell wherein they lay.

  They wrought meseems as those who should make a bargain with hell,

  That it grow a little cooler, and thus for ever to dwell.

  So passed the world on its ways, and weary with waiting we were.

  Men ate and drank and married; no wild cry smote the air,

  No great crowd ran together to greet the day of doom;

  And ever more and more seemed the town like a monstrous tomb

  To us, the Pilgrims of Hope, until to-night it came,

  And Hope on the stones of the street is written in letters of flame.

  This is how it befel: a workmate of mine had heard

  Some bitter speech in my mouth, and he took me up at the word,

  And said: "Come over to-morrow to our Radical spouting-place;

  For there, if we hear nothing new, at least we shall see a new face;

  He is one of those Communist chaps, and 'tis like that you two may agree."

  So we went, and the street was as dull and as common as aught you could see;

  Dull and dirty the room. Just over the chairman's chair

  Was a bust, a Quaker's face with nose cocked up in the air;

  There were common prints on the wall of the heads of the party fray,

  And Mazzini dark and lean amidst them gone astray.

  Some thirty men we were of the kind that I knew full well,

  Listless, rubbed down to the type of our easy-going hell.

  My heart sank down as I entered, and wearily there I sat

  While the chairman strove to end his maunder of this and of that.

  And partly shy he seemed, and partly indeed ashamed

  Of the grizzled man beside him as his name to us he named.

  He rose, thickset and short, and dressed in shabby blue,

  And even as he began it seemed as though I knew

  The thing he was going to say, though I never heard it before.

  He spoke, were it well, were it ill, as though a message he bore,

  A word that he could not refrain from many a million of men.

  Nor aught seemed the sordid room and the few that were listening then

  Save the hall of the labouring earth and the world which was to be.

  Bitter to many the message, but sweet indeed unto me,

  Of man without a master, and earth without a strife,

  And every soul rejoicing in the sweet and bitter of life:

  Of peace and good-will he told, and I knew that in faith he spake,

  But his words were my very thoughts, and I saw the battle awake,

  And I followed from end to end; and triumph grew in my heart

  As he called on each that heard him to arise and play his part

  In the tale of the new-told gospel, lest as slaves they should live and die.

  He ceased, and I thought the hearers would rise up with one cry,

  And bid him straight enrol them; but they, they applauded indeed,

  For the man was grown full eager, and had made them hearken and heed:

  But they sat and made no sign, and two of the glibber kind

  Stood up to jeer and to carp his fiery words to blind.

  I did not listen to them, but failed not his voice to hear

  When he rose to answer the carpers, striving to make more clear

  That which was clear already; not overwell, I knew,

  He answered the sneers and the silence, so hot and eager he grew;

  But my hope full well he answered, and when he called again

  On men to band together lest they live and die in vain,

  In fear lest he should escape me, I rose ere the meeting was done,

  And gave him my name and my faith-and I was the only one.

  He smiled as he heard the jeers, and there was a shake of the hand,

  He spoke like a friend long known; and lo! I was one of the band.

  And now the streets seem gay and the high stars glittering bright;

  And for me, I sing amongst them, for my heart is full and light.

  I see the deeds to be done and the day to come on the earth,

  And riches vanished away and sorrow turned to mirth;

  I see the city squalor and the country stupor gone.

  And we a part of it all-we twain no longer alone

  In the days to come of the pleasure, in the days that are of the fight -

  I was born once long ago: I am born again to-night.

  THE NEW PROLETARIAN

  How near to the goal are we now, and what shall we live to behold?

  Will it come a day of surprise to the best of the hopeful and bold?

  Shall the sun arise some morning and see men falling to work,

  Smiling and loving their lives, not fearing the ill that may lurk

  In every house on their road, in the very ground that they tread?

  Shall the sun see famine slain, and the fear of children dead?

  Shall he look adown on men set free from the burden of care,

  And the earth grown like to himself, so comely, clean and fair?

  Or else will it linger and loiter, till hope deferred hath spoiled

  All bloom of the life of man-yea, the day for which we have toiled?

  Till our hearts be turned to st
one by the griefs that we have borne,

  And our loving kindness seared by love from our anguish torn.

  Till our hope grow a wrathful fire, and the light of the second birth

  Be a flame to burn up the weeds from the lean impoverished earth.

  What's this? Meseems it was but a little while ago

  When the merest sparkle of hope set all my heart aglow!

  The hope of the day was enough; but now 'tis the very day

  That wearies my hope with longing. What's changed or gone away?

  Or what is it drags at my heart-strings?-is it aught save the coward's fear?

  In this little room where I sit is all that I hold most dear -

  My love, and the love we have fashioned, my wife and the little lad.

  Yet the four walls look upon us with other eyes than they had,

  For indeed a thing hath happened. Last week at my craft I worked,

  Lest oft in the grey of the morning my heart should tell me I shirked;

  But to-day I work for us three, lest he and she and I

  In the mud of the street should draggle till we come to the workhouse or die.

  Not long to tell is the story, for, as I told you before,

  A lawyer paid me the money which came from my father's store.

  Well, now the lawyer is dead, and a curious tangle of theft,

  It seems, is what he has lived by, and none of my money is left.

  So I who have worked for my pleasure now work for utter need:

  In "the noble army of labour" I now am a soldier indeed.

  "You are young, you belong to the class that you love," saith the rich man's sneer;

  "Work on with your class and be thankful." All that I hearken to hear,

  Nor heed the laughter much; have patience a little while,

  I will tell you what's in my heart, nor hide a jot by guile.

  When I worked pretty much for my pleasure I really worked with a will,

  It was well and workmanlike done, and my fellows knew my skill,

  And deemed me one of themselves though they called me gentleman Dick,

  Since they knew I had some money; but now that to work I must stick,

  Or fall into utter ruin, there's something gone, I find;

  The work goes, cleared is the job, but there's something left behind;

  I take up fear with my chisel, fear lies 'twixt me and my plane,

  And I wake in the merry morning to a new unwonted pain.

  That's fear: I shall live it down-and many a thing besides