| |
| America! | |
| England’s cheeky kid brother, | |
| Who bloodily assaulted your august elder | |
| At Bunker Hill and similar places | |
| (Not mentioned in o u r history books), | 5 |
| What can I tell you of war or of peace? | |
| Say, have you forgotten 1861? | |
| Bull Run, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg? | |
| Your million dead? | |
| Tell me, | 10 |
| Was that the greatest time of your lives | |
| Or the most disastrous? | |
| Who knows? Not you; not I. | |
| Who can tell the end of this war? | |
| And say, brother Jonathan, | 15 |
| D’you know what it’s all about? | |
| Let me whisper you a secret—we don’t! | |
| We were all too fat with peace, | |
| Or perhaps we didn’t quite know how good peace was, | |
| And so here we are, | 20 |
| And we’re going to win…. | |
| |
| It’s fine to be a soldier, | |
| To get accepted by the recruiting sergeant, | |
| Be trained, fitted with a uniform and a gun, | |
| Say good-bye to your girl, | 25 |
| And go off to the front | |
| Whistling, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.” | |
| It’s good to march forty miles a day, | |
| Carrying ninety-one pounds on your back, | |
| To eat good coarse food, get blistered, tired out, wounded, | 30 |
| Thirst, starve, fight like a devil | |
| (i. e., like you an’ me, Jonathan), | |
| With the Maxims zip-zipping | |
| And the shrapnel squealing, | |
| And the howitzers rumbling like the traffic in Piccadilly. | 35 |
| |
| Civilization?— | |
| Jonathan, if you could hear them | |
| Whistling the Marseillaise or Marching Through Georgia, | |
| You’d want to go too. | |
| Twenty thousand a day, Jonathan! | 40 |
| Perhaps you’re more civilized just now than we are, | |
| Perhaps we’ve only forgotten civilization for a moment, | |
| Perhaps we’re really fighting for peace. | |
| And after all it will be more fun afterwards— | |
| More fun for the poets and the painters— | 45 |
| When the cheering’s all over | |
| And the dead men buried | |
| And the rest gone back to their jobs. | |
| It’ll be more fun for them to make their patterns, | |
| Their word-patterns and color-patterns. | 50 |
| And after all, there is always war and always peace, | |
| Always the war of the crowds, | |
| Always the great peace of the arts. | |
| |
| Even now, | |
| With the war beating in great waves overhead, | 55 |
| Beating and roaring like great winds and mighty waters, | |
| The sea-gods still pattern the red seaweed fronds, | |
| Still chip the amber into neck-chains | |
| For Leucothea and Thetis. | |
| Even now, | 60 |
| When the Marseillaise screams like a hurt woman, | |
| And Paris—grisette among cities—trembles with fear, | |
| The poets still make their music | |
| Which nobody listens to, | |
| Which hardly anyone ever listened to. | 65 |
| |
| The great crowds go by, | |
| Fighting over each other’s bodies in peace-time, | |
| Fighting over each other’s bodies in war-time. | |
| Something of the strife comes to them | |
| In their little, high rock-citadel of art, | 70 |
| Where they hammer their dreams in gold and copper, | |
| Where they cut them in pine-wood, in Parian stone, in wax, | |
| Where they sing them in sweet bizarre words | |
| To the sound of antiquated shrill instruments; | |
| And they are happy. | 75 |
| The little rock-citadel of the artists | |
| Is always besieged; | |
| There, though they have beauty and silence, | |
| They have always tears and hunger and despair. | |
| But that little citadel has held out | 80 |
| Against all the wars of the world— | |
| Like England, brother Jonathan. | |
| It will not fall during the great war. | |
| |
| There is always war and always peace; | |
| Always the war of the crowds, | 85 |
| Always the great peace of the arts. | |
| |
