You'll weep again, and rock him on your heart As I did once, that night we had to part. And then perhaps you'll take him by the hand And comfort him from fear when he must stand Before God's dreadful throne; then, will you call That boy whose bullet made my darling fall, And take him by the other hand, and say... "O God, whose Son the hands of men did slay, These are Thy children who do take away The sins of the world. Irene Rutherford McLeod AN ENGLISH MOTHER 1 EVERY week of every season out of English ports go forth, White of sail or white of trail, East, or West, or South, or North, Scattering like a flight of pigeons, half a hundred home-sick ships, Bearing half a hundred striplings—each with kisses on his lips Of some silent mother, fearful lest she shows herself too fond, Giving him to bush or desert as one pays a sacred bond, -Tell us, you who hide your heartbreak, You who shared your babe's first sorrow when his cheek no longer pressed On the perfect, snow-and-roseleaf beauty of your mother-breast, In the rigor of his nurture was your woman's mercy mute, Knowing he was doomed to exile with the savage and the brute? 1 By permission of the author, Robert Underwood Johnson. From Saint-Gaudens and other Poems. Copyright, 1908, by Robert Underwood Johnson. Did you school yourself to absence all his adolescent years, That, though you be torn with parting, he should never see the tears? Now his ship has left the offing for the manymouthed sea, This your guerdon, empty heart, by empty bed to bend the knee? And if he be but the latest thus to leave your dwindling board, Is a sorrow less for being added to a sorrow's hoard? Is the mother-pain duller that to-day his brothers stand, Facing ambuscades of Congo, or alarms from Zululand? Toil, where blizzards drift the snow like smoke across the plains of death? Faint, where tropic fens at morning steam with fever-laden breath? Die, that in some distant river's veins the English blood may run Mississippi, Yangtze, Ganges, Nile, Mackenzie, Amazon? Ah! you still must wait and suffer in a solitude untold, While your sisters of the nations call you passive, call you cold Still must scan the news of sailings, breathless search the slow gazette, Find the dreadful name . . . and, later, get his blithe farewell! And yet Shall the lonely hearthstone shame the legions who have died Grudging not the price their country pays for progress and for pride? - Nay; but, England, do not ask us thus to emulate your scars Until women's tears are reckoned in the budgets of your wars. Robert Underwood Johnson MATRES DOLOROSE YE Spartan mothers, gentle ones, Fall'n, the flower of English youth, O what a delicate sacrifice! They rode to war as if to the hunt, Proud and spotless warriors they Ah, weeping mothers, now all is o'er, Robert Bridges THE ABSENT SOLDIER SON LORD, I am weeping. As Thou wilt, O Lord, spun Fall to the stranger's lot! Shall the wild bird, young That on the fleck and moult of brutish beasts Had been too happy, sleep in cloth of gold |