No time to glance where wounded leaders lie, Or think on fallen sparrows in the storm-- Only to fight! The prone commander’s form Stirs, rises stumblingly, And gropes where, under shrieking grape and musketry, Men’s bodies wamble like a mangled swarm Of bees. He bends to sight his gun again, Bleeding, and then-- Oh, out of void and old oblivion And reptile slime first rose Apollo’s head; And God in likeness of Himself, ’tis said, Created such an one, Now shaping Shakespeare’s forehead, now Napoleon, Various, by infinite invention bred, In His own image molding beautiful The human skull. Jock lifts his head; Macdonough sights his gun To fire--but in his face a ball of flesh, A whizzing clod, has hurled him in a mesh Of tangled rope and tun, While still about the deck the lubber clod is spun And, bouncing from the rail, lies in a plesh Of oozing blood, upstaring eyeless, red-- A gunner’s head. * * * * * Above the ships, enormous from the lake, Rises a wraith--a phantom dim and gory, Lifting her wondrous limbs of smoke and glory; And little children quake And lordly nations bow their foreheads for her sake, And bards proclaim her in their fiery story; And in her phantom breast, heartless unheeding, Hearts--hearts are bleeding. IV Macdonough lies with Downie in one land. Victor and vanquished long ago were peers. Held in the grip of peace an hundred years, England has laid her hand In ours, and we have held--and still shall hold--the band That makes us brothers of the hemispheres; Yea, still shall keep the lasting brotherhood Of law and blood. Yet one whose terror racked us long of yore Still wreaks upon the world her lawless might: Out of the deeps again the phantom Fight Looms on her wings of war, Sowing in armèd camps and fields her venomed spore, Embattling monarch’s whim against man’s right, Trampling with iron hoofs the blooms of time Back in the slime. We, who from dreams of justice, dearly wrought, First rose in the eyes of patient Washington, And through the molten heart of Lincoln won To liberty forgot, Now, standing lone in peace, ’mid titans strange distraught, Pray much for patience, more--God’s will be done!-- For vision and for power nobly to see The world made free. _The Outlook_ _Percy MacKaye_ THE PROPHET Jeremiah, will you come? Will you gather up the multitudes, and wake them with a drum? Will you dare anoint the chosen ones from all the cattle kind, And threaten with the fire of God the foolish and the blind?