WWI American
Immigrant Poetry
CORRUPT and sapped with jealousy and guile,
Accurst, O England, in an evil hour,
You sowed with hate and envy all your isle—
Envy of her who rose through toil to power.
Orgre of Time and vampire of the waves,
Who robbed a world through force and craft and guilt,
An empire piled on helpless nations’ graves—
Not on your strength, but on their weakness built.
Even now your withered heart must suck its blood
Through tentacles that drain a younger world;
Your impotence cries: “Arm!”—then arms with mud
And slimy tongues of demagogues uncurled.
Arch-hypocrite, smeared with infernal oil,
Holy you call your cause, your shops and ship,
You the great glutton and the lord of spoil,
Black with the cant that oozes from your lips.
Your howling hucksters thrust you into war,
Sly Pharisee whose blood is serpent-cold,
But you shall stand for judgment at a bar
Where steel is the clean arbiter, not gold.
False to your blood, your race, your ancient creed,
Lusting to seize the little others have,
You struck a sister-nation in her need
In foul compact with Mongol, Gaul and Slav.
You strove to pen a noble folk in bounds,
Inflamed its foes that glared from left to right—
You blest the bestial Cossack and his hounds,
Then came, a craven fourth, to join the fight.
And then the valiant foe you could not crush,
Nor face with equal sword, you struck with lies;
The pitch-black rivers from your presses rush,
And Truth falls smothered in the nations’ eyes.
Belgium! that lie has withered on your tongue,
Judas and juggler with the loaded dice—
Your Belgian trap by German swords was sprung—
Belgium! your dupe and now your sacrifice.
Louvain! its wounded monuments still speak
Not of a vandal’s but a traitor’s crime.
Perish in your false throat the curse and shriek,
Defiler of the Temple of all Time!
If sore beset, whelmed, by a vaster might,
The German host with broken sword should fall,
Yet would a glory make their falling bright,
And your base triumph thrust you to the wall.
Thrust you degraded in your day of doom,
Under the hoofs of Asia shod with steel,
When the fell Tartars through your cities loom,
Lash you with knouts and break you on the wheel—
Britain that strove to break the bulwark low
That German hearts reared ’gainst the swarming East,
Britain that sold the white race unto woe,
And flung the light of Europe to the Beast.