Minotaur of madness, you certainly belong there; Mountain grim of black stone, with relevancy rare You fit most perfectly your slum environment. In this shambles where every undertaker thrives, Where not one thing is quite so cheap as human lives, You are Death's eloquent, ideal advertisement. You go up mid tenements where out of fetid rooms Our cocky Irish lads march gaily to their dooms, Go down to Armageddon with a glory in their eyes. Just to lie down on winter's night in warm, clean bed, To know the joys of comradeship, to be well-fed, To slum-hell dwellers—what a door to Paradise! So they laugh, and snatch their guns from out your bloody hands; What a lark to leave the shop, and ship for foreign lands! These crippled Christs know no such sport in their drab, dull peace. Right merrily with cheers they welcome every war, With hearts full of hope and joy they throng your gaping door, War means not death and doom to these, but gay release! But ghost-haunted are your shadowy halls of gloom, Your gray roof's a shroud and your sooty walls a tomb, A tomb for herded, blinded saints of our humanity; A tomb where throng the ghosts of an uncounted host, A tomb where ruins lie of a myriad cities lost, O slumtown symbol of war's grim insanity! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...FOR [OR TO] THOSE WHO FAIL by CINCINNATUS HEINE MILLER THE WANDERING JEW by EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON THE NEW YEAR by ALFRED TENNYSON ODES: BOOK 1: ODE 12. TO SIR FRANCIS HENRY DRAKE, BARONET by MARK AKENSIDE HYMN TO FIRE by KONSTANTIN DMITRIYEVICH BALMONT THE TWO DREAMS by GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO BIARTEY'S SPINNING SONG, FR. THE RIDING TO LITHEND by GORDON BOTTOMLEY |