You'll weep again, and rock him on your

heart

As I did once, that night we had to part.
He'll come to you all bloody and be-mired,
But let him sleep, my dear, for he'll be tired,
And very shy. If he'd come home to me
I would n't ask the neighbours in to tea...
He always hated crowds. . . I'd let him
be.

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,
which is sadder, when all 's done,
To repine an English mother, or to roam, an
English son?

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,
Of lion-hearted, loving sons

Fall'n, the flower of English youth,
To a barbarous foe in a land uncouth:

O what a delicate sacrifice!
Unequal the stake and costly the price
As when the queen of Love deplor'd
Her darling by the wild beast gor'd.

They rode to war as if to the hunt,
But ye at home, ye bore the brunt,
Bore the siege of torturing fears,
Fed your hope on the bread of tears.

Proud and spotless warriors they
With love or sword to lead the way;
For ye had cradled heart and hand,
The commander hearken'd to your com-
mand.

Ah, weeping mothers, now all is o'er,
Ye know your honor and mourn no more:
Nor ask ye a name in England's story,
Who gave your dearest for her glory.

Robert Bridges

THE ABSENT SOLDIER SON

LORD, I am weeping. As Thou wilt, O Lord,
Do with him as Thou wilt; but O my God,
Let him come back to die! Let not the fowls
O' the air defile the body of my child,
My own fair child, that when he was a babe,
I lift up in my arms and gave to Thee!
Let not his garment, Lord, be vilely parted,
Nor the fine linen which these hands have

spun

Fall to the stranger's lot! Shall the wild bird,
That would have pilfered of the ox, this year
Disdain the
pens and stalls? Shall her blind

young

That on the fleck and moult of brutish

beasts

Had been too happy, sleep in cloth of gold