Collected Poems

To the Boers

(Written during the progress of the Boer War.)

O Boers, you have dared much and much endured
For freedom, your strong simple hearts inured
To danger and privation nor so made
As by death's daily grasp to be dismayed,
Nor numbers nor disasters in the field,
Nor to o'erwhelming multitudes to yield.
It was no secondary power you faced,
But she who has the whole wide world embraced,
England whose name is as the thunder, she
Whose navies are the despots of the sea,
Napoleon's conqueror whose fair dreadful face
Great nations loathe and fear and choose disgrace
Rather than meet in wild and dangerous war
Victors of Waterloo and Trafalgar.
But you, a band of armèd herdsmen small,
Feared not her strength, her pride imperial,
Nor all the union of her empire huge,
Nor all her barking cannon, her deluge
Of bullets, nor her horsehooves, nor her lance,
Her boundless wealth, her bayonets aglance.
You met her on her hills and overthrew,
You crossed her by her streams and smote and slew.
But soon in anger like the Ocean foiled
For fiercer swift invasion she recoiled
And multiplied her force until her troops
Tenfold outnumbering your warlike groups
Resurging rolled you back and seized your towns
And spread like locusts over fields and downs.
Not even then were you dismayed, not then
Would tamely yield, but with a proud disdain
Rejected proffered servitude and base.
Therefore are you participants in praise

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With Armin and Viriathus; you stand
The last of Freedom's children and your land
Her latest foothold upon earth; nor can
Your rugged pastoral mood disguise the man
Identical at Salamis who waged
Unequal battle and in salt floods assuaged
The Persian's lust of rule. Miltiades
Is grown your brother; the strong Tyrolese
Hold out their hands to you across the grave.
From Rouen's burning pile one watches; brave
Hofer from sad Verona; in eastern skies
Mewar's unconquerable Rajpoots rise.
They too preferred strong liberty and rude
To a splendid ignominy of servitude.
For liberty they gave to alien hands
Their faery city and their fertile lands,
Themselves to death, their women to the flame,
And in wild woods and mountains harbouring came
Often like sudden fire upon the foe:
So for long decades fought, exile and woe
Accepting, till the equal hand of God
Restored to their hereditary abode.
You too have greatly dared, and but that Fate
For her remoter objects obdurate
Averted her unmoved and marble gaze,
No human force had power to erase
From Earth's free peoples. Not the armed pride
Of England but decrees supreme o'erride
This stubborn nation. Farm and smiling field
Plundered and burned no more your sustenance yield,
Your chiefs are taken one by one, your bands
Wasted with battle, your great war-weary hands
Avail no longer and your women die
In England's camps by famine miserably,
Disease and famine, hunger's squalid brood.
The smiling babes who should prolong your blood,
Pale victims flit, to death's unbottomed maw

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Devoted by the conqueror's cynic law.
And must you perish from earth's record then,
O nation of indomitable men?
Look not towards Europe! Europe's heart is dead.
Hard atheisms, selfish lusts instead
Usurp her bosom; not honest blood but gold
Runs liquid in her veins: for she has sold
Her soul to commerce, Mammon is her creed,
The ledger lined her Bible, and Christ must bleed
In plundered nations that the modern Jew
May prosper. This is not Europe that you knew
When from the clash of mighty States you went
Into harsh sultry deserts well-content.
For all her swift and sovran moods of old
Are changed into a reckoning spirit cold
And a hysteric wrath that dare not strike
The strong man armed to meet the blow. She, like
A trembling woman who puts o'er her shift
Hard armour, wears the sword she dare not lift,
Covering her coward heart with splendid arms:
Clothed as in adamant shakes with pale alarms,
Armed as with hell-fire fronts not answering shells,
Blusters and trembles, menaces and pales.
Therefore her navies case in triple steel,
Therefore her legions grow apace; her heel
Of iron breaks the weak ones of the world,
But not against the strong her flags unfurled
Shall flaunt the tempest, nor her hissing flail
Of bullets thresh familiar hills and hail
Of shells in Ocean sibilant be drowned
While navies rend and sink her coasts around.
Easier the naked African to quell
Or on the ill-armed Mongolian shot and shell
To lavish and with coward murder chase
Or with strong lust invade a virtuous race.
Meanwhile her prating conferences increase
And gild her terrors with the name of peace.

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All these high nations who with paeans loud
Acclaimed your victories, the bitter crowd
And the loose tongues who spat their venom base
In England's evil hour on England's face
Avenging thus decades of craven fear,
Not one shall dare to speak high words with her
For your sake, none shall raise his armed hand
Against the inheritors of sea and land.
Nor shall the American's pale feverish face
Be lifted from his heaps of gold and trays
Of silver. Deal not with such things as these,
You who are men, not gibbering shades. Increase
Strength rather, of yourselves and Heaven be sure;
Firm make your hearts, magnanimous to endure
More than loud ruin. Though at last you yield,
Yet nowise vain your firmness in the field,
Daring and all the bitter sweat of blood.
Boers, you have sown the veldt with greatness, stood
Irrigating from your own veins farmstead
And kopje and with the bodies of your dead
Manured them: women and young children gave
Their lives to help the seedtime of the brave.
Shall harvest fail you? No, the Power is just
That veils Himself behind the world, not thrust
From puissance by the maxim's brutal roar
Nor to the shrapnel gives His sceptre o'er.
The harvest that you sowed, your sons shall reap,
Stern liberty; nor the example sleep
Imprisoned in the Afric seas, but hurled
Reverberate through the upstarting world.
And the dead nations in the East shall rise
And they that slumber in the West; with eyes
Dismayed the elder Empires overgrown
Shall feel a sudden spirit breathe, a tone
Of challenge hearkening know, at last awake,
Earth was not wide for one sole nation's sake.
For this He fashioned you Who built the stars,

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For this He sifted you with searching wars.
Upon the Frisian waters bleak and isles
Where the cold northern Ocean steel-like smiles,
Savage and wide and bare, a nation sparse
Bleak-fishing under the chill midnight stars,
From the wild piercing blast your fathers drew
The breath that loves the desert. To them grew
The Saxon dour and the hard German rude,
And of that stubborn ore unbrittle, crude,
God hammered Him a sword with giant strokes
Upon the anvil of the Ocean rocks;
His fiercest furnace piled the ore to try;
Often He tempered it, often laid by
Unknown of all to harden and anneal.
He made it not of the fine Damasc steel
Comely to see or polished dazzling bright,
A dancing splendour and a pitiless light,
Nor as in Jaipur worked with genial art,
But sheer and stark to rive the adamant heart.
With this He smote the Iberian and the Gaul;
This from his scabbard leaps whene'er o'er all
His earth of various use in various lands
One domination spreads out selfish hands.
Not for its own sake is the falchion keen,
Not for self-greatness was it forged, through skin,
Flesh, heart and bone of giant power to cleave.
Its flash is as the lightning on the eve
Of the stupendous storm that shall uproot
Some oak of empire. When Heaven grows a clot
Of darkness, then God's dagger rips the sky.
Small is the blade and narrow to the eye
The rift; but through it seas of light shall pour
And through it the world-shaking thunders roar
And from the storm the sweet fresh day have birth.
When Spain was mighty and cruel and all earth
Darkened by her huge shadow, your fathers first
Defied her puissance;—they the chains accursed

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Asunder rent and braved the bigot's flame
And braved the unvanquished terrors of her name.
Then England grew, then France arose. The one
Repulsed her from the sea's dominion
Making the narrow floods an empire's tomb
When the shot-ridden galleons through the gloom
Of heaven and the wrath of spuming seas
Fled through grey Ocean and the Hebrides,
God's anger swift behind. Then was her hand
Loosened from France's throat; the smiling land
Healed her deep wounds and from her masculine strife
Of mighty spirits forged united life
Now first; so, her high natural vigour found,
Hurled the wide-sprawling Titan to the ground.
But 'twas stern Holland shore his feet of clay
Opening to these the splendours of their day.
Next when great Louis' grandiose mind and high
O'ervaulted all the West like God's own sky,
Your fathers first opposed their petty strength
To his huge destinies; nor defeat, nor length
Of weary struggle could out-tire nor break
Their spirit obstinate for freedom's sake,
When Nassau led them. He was such a man
As you love best to set in your stern van,
Wordless and lonely, stubborn as the hills,
With nature strong to brook tremendous ills
In silence, dowered with vigilant brain and nerve
That never from the goal consent to swerve
But tame down fiercest Fate as men may school
Some dangerous lion to constraining rule.
He sowed the seed; strong England reaped the fruit,
Bringing down showers with the loud cannon's bruit.
Then did she grow indeed. Iberia proud
Being humbled she upon the Ocean loud
Her dwarfish stature launched, but now she trod
Both hemispheres, now giantlike bestrode
The Atlantic and her crest was in the skies,

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Earth but a market for her merchandise.
The double Indies all their wealth disgorged
To swell her and her thunders iron-forged
Possessed the hither and the farther seas:
She strewed their waters with her enemies.
Ever she grew and as when Rome was great,
No limit seemed of her supreme estate.
Frore Canada to the Austral heats she joins
And peoples Earth from her exhaustless loins.
Asia and the equator were her spoil,
Her footstool, or a workshop for her toil.
Nor sole she walked, but Europe emulous
Where she had trampled followed orgulous
Like dwarfs behind a giant, gleaning wide
Footholds too small for her gigantic stride.
They too grow great, they too are sons of God
Who meant, they say, all earth for their abode
And increase; others the Almighty made
Their menial peoples, stamped with yellow shade
Or dark, savage of heart, of reason weak.
Nay, but their lords shall make them wise and meek!
Inferior races, let them serve and crouch
Obedient, with the kennel for their couch,
Too happy if but spared the knout and rod.
Yet shall the proud blasphemers know that God
For nobler uses to immortal man
This body's garb designed when He began
To build the planets. His foreseeing eyes
Of ease and its corroding puissance wise,
Reserving to more memorable blows,
From you His chosen stock your sternest chose
And hardest in the grain and drove them forth
From their too populous and prosperous North
Over to torrid regions burning far
Under a fierier sun and brighter star.
There had He worked His Amazulu hordes
To His great purpose 'neath their savage lords,

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Chaka the brain of war and Dingaan;—there
Your steel was once again in the red flare
Of that strong furnace tested and annealed,
And that its hard rough temper glints might yield
Of fire, into its molten ore He sank
The Celt's swift force and genius of the Frank:
Nor in the wave-washed regions of the south
Allowed your home, but to the higher drouth
Scourged northward half the iron-minded brood
In the high hills and the veldt's solitude
'Twixt Vaal and the Limpopo. There you stand
Fighting for liberty and fatherland,
O little people of a mighty birth,
The huge colossus who bestrides the earth.
Therefore let not defeat your hearts dismay,
For He that made you, knows His hour,—today
Or after Time grows old, the Spirit high
Prepares His mighty ends unwaveringly.
Not by the fluent tongue is Freedom earned,
Nor lightly, but when her spirit long has burned
In the strong bosom fronting giant fears
And wrestling with defeat and hostile years,
Antagonist of its opposing fate,—
Such hearts earn mighty Freedom for their mate.
Such hearts are yours and will not falter. Firm
Your destiny stands assured its strenuous term
In God's great keeping who His deathless trust
Keeps for the race when your strong hearts are dust,—
Freedom that blooms not but upon the grave
Where they who loved her sleep, her slaughtered brave.

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