| |
| DO ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, | |
| Ere the sorrow comes with years? | |
| They are leaning their young heads against their mothers— | |
| And that cannot stop their tears. | |
| The young lambs are bleating in the meadows; | 5 |
| The young birds are chirping in the nest; | |
| The young fawns are playing with the shadows; | |
| The young flowers are blowing toward the west— | |
| But the young, young children, O my brothers, | |
| They are weeping bitterly! | 10 |
| They are weeping in the playtime of the others, | |
| In the country of the free. | |
| |
| Do you question the young children in the sorrow | |
| Why their tears are falling so? | |
| The old man may weep for his to-morrow | 15 |
| Which is lost in Long Ago; | |
| The old tree is leafless in the forest, | |
| The old year is ending in the frost, | |
| The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest, | |
| The old hope is hardest to be lost: | 20 |
| But the young, young children, O my brothers, | |
| Do you ask them why they stand | |
| Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, | |
| In our happy Fatherland? | |
| |
| They look up with their pale and sunken faces, | 25 |
| And their looks are sad to see, | |
| For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses | |
| Down the cheeks of infancy; | |
| “Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary, | |
| Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak; | 30 |
| Few paces have we taken, yet are weary— | |
| Our grave-rest is very far to seek. | |
| Ask the old why they weep, and not the children, | |
| For the outside earth is cold, | |
| And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering, | 35 |
| And the graves are for the old.”… | |
| |
| “For oh,” say the children, “we are weary, | |
| And we cannot run or leap; | |
| If we cared for any meadows, it were merely | |
| To drop down in them and sleep. | 40 |
| Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping, | |
| We fall upon our faces, trying to go; | |
| And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, | |
| The reddest flower would look as pale as snow. | |
| For, all day, we drag our burden tiring | 45 |
| Through the coal-dark, underground, | |
| Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron | |
| In the factories, round and round. | |
| |
| “For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning; | |
| Their wind comes in our faces, | 50 |
| Till our hearts turn, our head, with pulses burning, | |
| And the walls turn in their places: | |
| Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling, | |
| Turns the long light that drops adown the wall, | |
| Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, | 55 |
| All are turning, all the day, and we with all. | |
| And all day, the iron wheels are droning, | |
| And sometimes we could pray, | |
| ‘O ye wheels,’ (breaking out in a mad moaning) | |
| ‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”… | 60 |
| |
| They look up, with their pale and sunken faces, | |
| And their look is dread to see, | |
| For they mind you of the angels in their places, | |
| With eyes turned on Deity. | |
| “How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation, | 65 |
| Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,— | |
| Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, | |
| And tread onward to your throne amid the mart? | |
| Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper, | |
| And your purple shows your path! | 70 |
| But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper | |
| Than the strong man in his wrath.” | |
| |
