| |
| WHEN you destroy a blade of grass | |
| You poison England at her roots: | |
| Remember no man’s foot can pass | |
| Where evermore no green life shoots. | |
| |
| You force the birds to wing too high | 5 |
| Where your unnatural vapours creep: | |
| Surely the living rocks shall die | |
| When birds no rightful distance keep. | |
| |
| You have brought down the firmament | |
| And yet no heaven is more near; | 10 |
| You shape huge deeds without event, | |
| And half-made men believe and fear. | |
| |
| Your worship is your furnaces, | |
| Which, like old idols, lost obscenes, | |
| Have molten bowels; your vision is | 15 |
| Machines for making more machines. | |
| |
| O, you are busied in the night, | |
| Preparing destinies of rust; | |
| Iron misused must turn to blight | |
| And dwindle to a tetter’d crust. | 20 |
| |
| The grass, forerunner of life, has gone, | |
| But plants that spring in ruins and shards | |
| Attend until your dream is done: | |
| I have seen hemlock in your yards. | |
| |
| The generations of the worm | 25 |
| Know not your loads piled on their soil; | |
| Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm | |
| Till your strong flagstones heave and toil. | |
| |
| When the old hollow’d earth is crack’d, | |
| And when, to grasp more power and feasts, | 30 |
| Its ores are emptied, wasted, lack’d, | |
| The middens of your burning beasts | |
| |
| Shall be raked over till they yield | |
| Last priceless slags for fashionings high, | |
| Ploughs to wake grass in every field, | 35 |
| Chisels men’s hands to magnify. | |
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