O, heinous War, Hell’s very incarnation!
Whose countenance is black with darkest hate,
Whose eyes have serpent’s gleam of greed and lust,
And fiendish satisfaction, when the dust
Of God’s fair earth with precious blood is sate,
Who laughs at the destruction of a nation.
Whose breath is pois’nous fumes and dire disease,
And darting flames, devouring man’s abodes,
Whose voice with terror fills all living things,
And nought attracts except the vulture’s wings,
Its rending roar the very heaven goads
Until the dark’ning cloud a-weeping flees.
Whose brutish hands, with gore and grime polluted,
Are strangling innocents and ripping wombs,
And gagging Virtue’s cry, and sundering
The maiden from her mother; plundering
The aged and the sick, yea, even the tombs
Of those “at rest” are by this monster looted.
It rules the empires, and it rules the seas,
It is the prince of power in the air,
And kings and nations worship it with fear,
But drunk with blood they loud and wildly cheer,
And think its glory great beyond compare,
Yea, worth all loss and human miseries.
O, Christ, who stood on storm-tossed Galilee,
Reproaching evil, saying: “Peace be still!”
So all the fury of the storm and wave
Abated, and the struggling ship was safe,
Speak thou again that word divine, until
The world shall hear, and war shall cease to be!
O, may the day-spring from on High appear,
When this foul monster shall be chained in Hell,
When man, freed from its tyranny, shall be
The blessed of the Lord, in harmony
With every race which under heaven dwell,
And all his life be like a golden year!
X
Sordino from the fated city fled,
When he beheld destruction’s hand engaged
In Vandalism on the house of God;
It seemed to him an awful chastening-rod,
Because of sin which heaven had enraged,
For which the blood of thousands now was shed.
When he perceived resistance was in vain,
The city’s doom declared in blood and fire,
He left it under cover of the night,
With thousand others. Pausing in his flight
He saw the flames from the cathedral spire
Leap ’gainst the angry clouds of storm and rain.
He first sought safety at his country-seat,
A villa rich in orchard and in field,
Where he did shelter homeless refugees,
And here, for many days they lived in peace,
Until the country, too, itself must yield,
And valiant men before the foe retreat.
We will not here relate the conflict’s trend,
Sufficient that at last the enemy
Was driven from the land by armies strong,
And as in days of the heroic song,
With plunder rich, across the stormy sea,
They to their home-land shores the course did wend.
Deep sadness fell upon Sordino’s heart
For all the sorrow of his countrymen,
For all the ravages wrought by the foe,
But most of all his cup seemed overflow
With grief beyond the measure of our ken,
Because he from his chimes did have to part.
He restless grew, no place found him content,
No pleasure could his spirit satisfy,
His former love of study him forsook,
And e’en on nature he did cease to look
With that true, heartfelt joy of years gone by,--
His days in gloom and ennui were spent.
At last he in his heart resolved to go
Upon a journey--he knew hardly where--
In quest of his beloved bells, though none
For certain seemed to know where they had gone,
Still he would travel over land and mere,--
With this resolve his soul was soon aglow.