To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,— All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilisation, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too!... does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls, And pine and die, because of the great sum Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad! You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping; but a million sick ... You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you, must remain Uninfluenced by you.—Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives, Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,—and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.’