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The English Game Laws
THE MERRY brown hares came leaping | |
| Over the crest of the hill, | |
| Where the clover and corn lay sleeping, | |
| Under the moonlight still. | |
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| Leaping late and early, | 5 |
| Till under their bite and their tread, | |
| The swedes, and the wheat, and the barley | |
| Lay cankered, and trampled, and dead. | |
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| A poacher’s widow sat sighing | |
| On the side of the white chalk bank, | 10 |
| Where, under the gloom of fire-woods, | |
| One spot in the lea throve rank. | |
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| She watched a long tuft of clover, | |
| Where rabbit or hare never ran, | |
| For its black sour haulm covered over | 15 |
| The blood of a murdered man. | |
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| She thought of the dark plantation, | |
| And the hares, and her husband’s blood, | |
| And the voice of her indignation | |
| Rose up to the throne of God: | 20 |
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| “I am long past wailing and whining, | |
| I have wept too much in my life: | |
| I ’ve had twenty years of pining | |
| As an English laborer’s wife. | |
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| “A laborer in Christian England, | 25 |
| Where they cant of a Saviour’s name, | |
| And yet waste men’s lives like the vermin’s | |
| For a few more brace of game. | |
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| “There ’s blood on your new foreign shrubs, squire, | |
| There ’s blood on your pointer’s feet; | 30 |
| There ’s blood on the game you sell, squire, | |
| And there ’s blood on the game you eat. | |
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| “You have sold the laboring man, squire, | |
| Both body and soul to shame, | |
| To pay for your seat in the House, squire, | 35 |
| And to pay for the feed of your game. | |
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| “You made him a poacher yourself, squire, | |
| When you ’d give neither work nor meat, | |
| And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden | |
| At our starving children’s feet; | 40 |
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| “When, packed in one reeking chamber, | |
| Man, maid, mother, and little ones lay; | |
| While the rain pattered in on the rotten bride-bed, | |
| And the walls let in the day; | |
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| “When we lay in the burning fever, | 45 |
| On the mud of the cold clay floor, | |
| Till you parted us all for three months, squire, | |
| At the cursèd workhouse door. | |
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| “We quarrelled like brutes, and who wonders? | |
| What self-respect could we keep, | 50 |
| Worse housed than your hacks and your pointers, | |
| Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep? | |
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| “Our daughters, with base-born babies, | |
| Have wandered away in their shame; | |
| If your misses had slept, squire, where they did, | 55 |
| Your misses might do the same. | |
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| “Can your lady patch hearts that are breaking, | |
| With handfuls of coals and rice, | |
| Or by dealing out flannel and sheeting | |
| A little below cost price? | 60 |
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| “You may tire of the jail and the workhouse, | |
| And take to allotments and schools, | |
| But you ’ve run up a debt that will never | |
| Be repaid us by penny-club rules. | |
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| “In the season of shame and sadness, | 65 |
| In the dark and dreary day, | |
| When scrofula, gout, and madness | |
| Are eating your race away; | |
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| “When to kennels and liveried varlets | |
| You have cast your daughters’ bread, | 70 |
| And, worn out with liquor and harlots, | |
| Your heir at your feet lies dead; | |
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| “When your youngest, the mealy-mouthed rector, | |
| Lets your soul rot asleep to the grave, | |
| You will find in your God the protector | 75 |
| Of the freeman you fancied your slave.” | |
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| She looked at the tuft of clover, | |
| And wept till her heart grew light; | |
| And at last, when her passion was over, | |
| Went wandering into the night. | 80 |
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| But the merry brown hares came leaping | |
| Over the uplands still, | |
| Where the clover and corn lay sleeping | |
| On the side of the white chalk hill. | |
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