Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Songs of Labor and Reform

The Voices

“WHY urge the long, unequal fight,

Since Truth has fallen in the street,

Or lift anew the trampled light,

Quenched by the heedless million’s feet?

“Give o’er the thankless task; forsake

The fools who know not ill from good:

Eat, drink, enjoy thy own, and take

Thine ease among the multitude.

“Live out thyself; with others share

Thy proper life no more; assume

The unconcern of sun and air,

For life or death, or blight or bloom.

“The mountain pine looks calmly on

The fires that scourge the plains below,

Nor heeds the eagle in the sun

The small birds piping in the snow!

“The world is God’s, not thine; let Him

Work out a change, if change must be:

The hand that planted best can trim

And nurse the old unfruitful tree.”

So spake the Tempter, when the light

Of sun and stars had left the sky;

I listened, through the cloud and night,

And heard, methought, a voice reply:

“Thy task may well seem over-hard,

Who scatterest in a thankless soil

Thy life as seed, with no reward

Save that which Duty gives to Toil.

“Not wholly is thy heart resigned

To Heaven’s benign and just decree,

Which, linking thee with all thy kind,

Transmits their joys and griefs to thee.

“Break off that sacred chain, and turn

Back on thyself thy love and care;

Be thou thine own mean idol, burn

Faith, Hope, and Trust, thy children, there.

“Released from that fraternal law

Which shares the common bale and bliss,

No sadder lot could Folly draw,

Or Sin provoke from Fate, than this.

“The meal unshared is food unblest:

Thou hoard’st in vain what love should spend;

Self-ease is pain; thy only rest

Is labor for a worthy end;

“A toil that gains with what it yields,

And scatters to its own increase,

And hears, while sowing outward fields,

The harvest-song of inward peace.

“Free-lipped the liberal streamlets run,

Free shines for all the healthful ray;

The still pool stagnates in the sun,

The lurid earth-fire haunts decay!

“What is it that the crowd requite

Thy love with hate, thy truth with lies?

And but to faith, and not to sight,

The walls of Freedom’s temple rise?

“Yet do thy work; it shall succeed

In thine or in another’s day;

And, if denied the victor’s meed,

Thou shalt not lack the toiler’s pay.

“Faith shares the future’s promise; Love’s

Self-offering is a triumph won;

And each good thought or action moves

The dark world nearer to the sun.

“Then faint not, falter not, nor plead

Thy weakness; truth itself is strong;

The lion’s strength, the eagle’s speed,

Are not alone vouchsafed to wrong.

“Thy nature, which, through fire and flood,

To place or gain finds out its way,

Hath power to seek the highest good,

And duty’s holiest call obey!

“Strivest thou in darkness?—Foes without

In league with traitor thoughts within;

Thy night-watch kept with trembling Doubt

And pale Remorse the ghost of Sin?

“Hast thou not, on some week of storm,

Seen the sweet Sabbath breaking fair,

And cloud and shadow, sunlit, form

The curtains of its tent of prayer?

“So, haply, when thy task shall end,

The wrong shall lose itself in right,

And all thy week-day darkness blend

With the long Sabbath of the light!”

1854.