How shall we utter
This horror, this rage, this despair?
How shall we strike at baseness,
Cut through disgust with scorn?
How rend with slashed fingers
The bars and walls of their lives
Which blacken our air and pure light?
What are they? Alien, brutish,
Base seed of Earth’s ravished womb;
Shall we yield our light and our truth—
The flash of the helm
And the foam-grey eyes and the hair
Braided with gold,
Steel mail on a firm breast?
Shall we yield?
Their life, their truth?
O laugh of disdain!
If ours be a goddess,
Chaste, proud, and austere;
What is theirs?
A boastful woman, a whore,
Whose vice is most stupid, most foul;
One greasy of flesh, stale
With hot musty perfume—
While ours—
Firm-fleshed as the treeless hills
With her rigid breasts and hard thighs,
Cold and perfect and fresh—
Fields crisp with new frost—
Sets the violet-crown in her hair,
Turns an unstained brow to the sky.
Let us stand by the earth-shaking sea
Unfurrowed by a hull,
Let us move among beeches and oaks
Unprofaned by loud speech;
Let us reverence the sacred earth
And the roar of unbridled falls
And the crash of an untamed sea,
Let us shade our eyes from the sun
And gaze through the fluttering leaves
Far, most far;
Shall we see her hill
And the marble front of her house
And herself, standing calm,
Many-coloured, triumphant, austere?