ANOTHER gem to deck your crown of shame, Already spangled thick with hellish deeds; Such bloody laurels plucked in Kultur's name Sit well upon the ruffians that she breeds. To you, such words as Pity, Shame or Ruth Convey no meaning, human or divine; To plead the sacred names of Right or Truth Were casting pearls before a Prussian swine. Poor shattered ark, I seem to see her die; The gliding death, the blow, the thunder roar, The riven plates and wreckage hurled on high, The quivering body reeling, stricken sore. One breath of awful silence, then the cries Torn from a thousand tortured souls are rife, And shiver upward to the quiet skies, Fraught with a piteous strangled prayer for life. Over she heels, and heeling flings the tide Of poor humanity as atoms cast Into the heaving waste, erst rode in pride Therein to find an Ocean yet more vast. Lower she sinks, the waters lap her deck, Her gaping wounds in torrents suck the wave That drags her down, a torn and dying wreck To lie for ever in an ocean grave. Thou sanguined fiend, in lowest deeps of hell No devil's spawn conceived a fouler crime, Nor arts infernal wove a blacker spell Than thou, most callous scoundrel of all time. Outside the human pale, no act too vile For your black soul to fashion or obtain, Hell's venom lags, outstripped by Prussian guile, Hell's horrors pale before a Prussian brain. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PROTESTS (AFTER A PAINTING BY HUGO BALLIN) by LOUIS UNTERMEYER A LOVE LETTER by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR AT THE SHRINE by RICHARD KENDALL MUNKITTRICK THE SECOND MOTHERHOOD by ST. CLAIR ADAMS COMEDY by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH PREMATURE REJOICING by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |