O world grown sick with butchery and manifold distress!
O broken Belgium robbed of all save grief and ghastliness!
Should Prussian power enslave the world and arrogance prevail,
Let chaos come, let Moloch rule, and Christ give place to Baal.
THE VISION OF SPRING, 1916
ALL night in a cottage far
Death and I had waged our war
Where, at such a bitter cost,
Death had won and I had lost;
And as I climbed up once more
From that poor, tear-darkened door,
From the valley seemed to rise,
In one cry, all human cries—
Yea, from such a mortal woe
Earth seemed at its overthrow,
And the very deeps unlocked
Of all anguished ages, mocked
In that they beheld at last
This their self-sown holocaust,
And their latest, loveliest sons
Shattered by ten thousand guns.
Then the friend who said to me,
Naught's so brief as agony,
Seemed to stand revealed and blind,
And a foe to humankind,
And I cried, Why very Spring
Shudders at this fearful thing,
And withholds her kindling sun,
Seeing Life and Grief are one.
Nay, said he, but in all earth
There's one power, and that is Birth,
And the starkest human pain
