Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,--this modern Prometheus,--hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!" Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!" _The Riddle of the Sphinx_ Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern Sea! Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free! The muttered music of thy streams, the whisper of the deep, Have kissed each other in God's name and kissed a world to sleep. The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky, And not from the East and not from the West knelled that soul-waking cry, But out of the South,--the sad, black South--it screamed from the top of the sky, Crying: "Awake, O ancient race!" Wailing, "O woman, arise!" And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the midnight cries,-- But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world stifled her sighs. The white world's vermin and filth: All the dirt of London, All the scum of New York; Valiant spoilers of women And conquerers of unarmed men; Shameless breeders of bastards, Drunk with the greed of gold, Baiting their blood-stained hooks With cant for the souls of the simple; Bearing the white man's burden Of liquor and lust and lies!