Up the slopes and thro’ the smoke-clouds, thro’ the dying and the dead, Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout, On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt! O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain That remembered Egypt’s flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed again— Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills, And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills. There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves, (Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of slaves, Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stew Where freedom “broadens down” so slow it stops with lords and you! O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes, Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times, Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet knights Tilted gaily or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights? O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best, Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not rest— Men of science, “vivisectors!”—democrats, the “rout of beasts”— Writers, essayists and poets, “Belial’s prophets, Moloch’s priests!” Coward, you have made the great refusal? you have won the gilded praise Of the wringers of his heart’s-blood from the peasant’s sunless days, Of the lord and the land-owner, of the rich man who has bound Labour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the ground, With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had, Crying, “Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them mad!” Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to take What of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood’s sake, Blustering long and loudest at the hideousness and pain These you praise have brought upon us; blustering long and loud again At our agony and anguish in this desperate fight of ours, Grappling with anarch custom and the darkness and the powers! O begone, then, from among us! Echo not, however faint, Our great watch-word, our great war-shout, sweet and sickly poet-saint! Sit there dreaming in your gardens, looking out upon the sea, Till the night-time closes round you and the wind is on the lea. Enter then within your chambers in the rich and quiet light; Never think of us who struggle in the tempest and the night. Soothe your fancy with your visions; bend a gracious senile ear To the praise your guests are murmuring in the tone you love to hear. Honoured of your Queen, and honoured of the gentlest and the best, Lord and commoner and rich-man, smirking tenant, shopman, priest, All distinguished and respectable, the shiny sons of light, O what, O what are these who call you coward in the night? Ay, what are we who struggled for the cause of Science, say,