Songs of the Army of the Night. Adams Francis William Lauderdale
We the same course keep.
Where go all the gains? Well,
It must be confessed,
First the landlords take the rent,
And the masters take the rest.
What do we produce for it?
Gentlemen! – and then
Imitation snobs who’d be
Like the gentlemen!
“What, is it for such as these
That we suffer thus?
Fuddle-brained and vicious fools,
Vermin venomous?
“What, is that why on the top
Creeps that Royal Louse,
The prince of pheasants and cigars,
Of ballet-girls and grouse?”
Yes, that’s why, my Christian friends,
They slave and slaughter us.
England is made a dunghill that
Some bugs may breed and buzz.
“What, are you lost, my pretty little lady?
This is no place for such sweet things as you.
Our bodies, rank with sweat, will make you sicken,
And, you’ll observe, our lives are rank lives too.”
“Oh no, I am not lost! Oh no, I’ve come here
(And I have brought my lute, see, in my hand),
To see you, and to sing of all you suffer
To the great world, and make it understand!”
“Well, say! If one of those who’d robbed you thousands,
Dropped you a sixpence in the gutter where
You lay and rotted, would you call her angel,
For all her charming smile and dainty air?”
“Oh no, I come not thus! Oh no, I’ve come here
With heart indignant, pity like a flame,
To try and help you!” – “Pretty little lady,
It will be best you go back whence you came.”
“‘Enthusiasms’ we have such little time for!
In our rude camp we drill the whole day long.
When we return from out the serried battle,
Come, and we’ll listen to your pretty song!”
My Lord, at last you have it! Now we know
Truth’s not a phrase, justice an idle show.
Your life ran red with murder, green with lust.
Blood has washed blood clean, and, in the final dust
Your carrion will be purified. Yet, see,
Though your body perish, for your soul shall be
An immortality of infamy!
’Tis not when I am here,
In these homeless homes,
Where sin and shame and disease
And foul death comes;
’Tis not when heart and brain
Would be still and forget
Men and women and children
Dragged down to the pit:
But when I hear them declaiming
Of “liberty,” “order,” and “law,”
The husk-hearted gentleman
And the mud-hearted bourgeois,
That a sombre hateful desire
Burns up slow in my breast
To wreck the great guilty temple,
And give us rest!
“The foxes have holes,
And the birds of the air have nests,
But where shall the heads of the sons of men
Be laid, be laid?”
“Where the cold corpse rests,
Where the sightless moles
Burrow and yet cannot make it afraid,
Rout but cannot wake it again,
There shall the heads of the sons of men
Be laid, laid!”
Where is poor Jesus gone?
He sits with Dives now,
And not even the crumbs are flung
To Lazarus below.
Where is poor Jesus gone?
Is he with Magdalen?
He doles her one by one
Her wages of shame!
Where is poor Jesus gone?
The good Samaritan,
What does he there alone?
He stabs the wounded man!
Where is poor Jesus gone,
The lamb they sacrificed?
They’ve made God of his carrion
And labelled it “Christ!”
“He holds a pistol to my head,
Swearing that he will shoot me dead,
If he have not my purse instead,
The robber!”
“He, with the lash of wealth and power,
Flogs out my heart and flings the dower,
The plundered pittance of his hour,
The robber!”
“He shakes his serpent tongue that lies,
Wins trust for poisoned sophistries
And stabs me in the dark, and flies,
The assassin!”
“He pits me in the dreadful fight
Against my fellow. Then he quite
Strips both his victims in the night,
The assassin!”
This is what I pray
In this horrible day,
In this terrible
In