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STAND UP AND MEET THE WAR

With acknowledgements to Rudyard Kipling

By Wolcott Frederic


I.


STAND up and meet the war!

The war by others bred.

Stand up and quote the Law!

Stand up and count the dead!

The needless sacrifice,

The foolishness and whim.

In prayer lift up your voice,

To men, but not to Him.

Though all the years depart,

Your brazen pretense stand:

In hardness keep your heart!

In vengeance lift your hand!”


II.


No law except the sword,”

That sickening lie of old,

Comes now to judge your word,

Comes now to mock your gold.

Once more it calls mankind,

Driven, oppressed, and slow

To rise, and break, and bind

The nations’ inmost foe.


III.


Bombast, pretense, deceit—

The nations’ seeming aim—

Are vanished in a night.

Only the Truth remains

To meet the sorrowing days.

All that we have and are,

Have fallen by the ways,

Have fed the flame of war.

Though all the years depart,

Your brazen pretense stand:

Let kindness melt your heart!

Let meekness stay your hand!”


IV.


The easy hopes and lies

By which you sought the goal

Call now for sacrifice.

To-day you pay the toll.

Stand up and meet the war!

The strife by others bred.

Stand up and quote the Law!

Stand up and count the dead!



Frederic, Wolcott. “Stand Up and Meet the War.” The Fatherland 1, no. 23 (January 13, 1915): 15.


Frederic, Wolcott. “Stand Up and Meet the War.” The Fatherland 1, no. 23 (January 13, 1915): 15.

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Rudyard Kipling

Born in India, Rudyard Kipling (1876–1936) was schooled in England but returned to India in 1892, where he worked as a journalist and published collections of short stories about India. Because of these and his novel, Kim (1901), Kipling became known as “the laureate of empire.” He was the first British writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907).


Sutherland, John. “Kipling, Rudyard.” In The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, edited by Jenny Stringer. Oxford University Press, 1996. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192122711.001.0001/acref-9780192122711-e-1565.


Pinney, Thomas. “Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865–1936), writer and poet.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-34334.

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Stand up and meet the war

The title of this poem is a variation of a line in Kipling’s poem, “For All We Have and Are,” written in 1914: “For all we have and are, / For all our children’s fate, / Stand up and take the war, / The Hun is at the gate!”


Kipling, Rudyard. “For All We Have and Are.” In The Years Between, 20–22. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1919. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044086830403?urlappend=%3Bseq=50.

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In hardness keep your heart

The original reads: “In courage keep your heart, / In strength lift up your hand.”

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No law except the sword

The original reads: “No law except the Sword / Unsheathed and uncontrolled.”

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Let kindness melt your heart

The original reads: “In patience keep your heart, / In strength lift up your hand.”