Rulers

Ye who prefer loud claim to lead mankind,
Those armies labouring ever weary and blind !
When they have seemed to win some miles of way
For all their errors and circuitous delay.
For all long anguish of their multitude.
And piteous bones of impotent heroes strewed
Along the ages, is it a light thing ye
Would thrust them backward many a century?
Is it a small thing ye have nursed the fire
Malign of blind inherited desire,
If so ye may reinstate Fraud with Force
On their old thrones, and miserable man divorce
From life, from light, from Liberty the bride,
A holy love, and a celestial guide ?
Ye trouble our slowly clearing airs of Peace,
Lest in the strengthening sunlight may increase
Shy human happiness, and men mature release
From shameful fume-fed slumbers ye impose,
That human souls may grovel for you, your pillows of repose !

Behold the vessel of Human Destiny,
A hull dismasted, flounders pitifully !
Though on a foaming sea by night she drift,
A few pale stars fly hurrying in the rift,
And she floats onward : lo ! some sheltering port
Hath lit the beacon : here may she resort
Awhile ; she hails the light — she grates the rock —
And shuddering staggers shattered with the shock !
Ye, ye, the wreckers, lit your specious lie
To lure lost men to this extremity !
Now, like infernal fiends, ye scour the shore,
To plunder and slay the drowning 'mid the roar:
Some shall escape your treacherous royal hands.
And sail anew, and find the far-off lands :
Shall not their fierce free children yet embrue
Their hands, crowned pirates ! in the blood of you ?

A moment only front the fearful sight :
Do not all angels, shrinking with affright,
Turn from our world their wounded heavenly faces,
To find in stars remote more hopeful dwellingplaces,
Where never sound may reach them more from our lost, ruined races ? . . .
. . . An Empire floats a banner.
Sable and white and red,
Dyed with ravine and famine and plague,
And blood of the innocent dead :
Black with pestilence, white with famine, red with the innocent dead !