Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SERFS, by PATRICK MACGILL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SERFS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: In the lands that the leagueless and lonely, where / fugitive, funeral-paced
Last Line: They are our serfs and our — brothers, slighted, forsaken, outcast.
Subject(s): Labor & Laborers; Slavery; Work; Workers; Serfs


IN the lands that the leagueless and lonely, where fugitive, funeral-paced,
The day drags askance from the darkness to glower on the destitute waste,
Where raw-ribbed and desolate reaches ruggedly run to the sky,
Where the grim goring peaks of the mountains sunder the heavens on high,
Sullen and lowering and livid, furrowless, measureless, vast,
Pregnant with riches unravished, bearing a recordless past,
Hemmed with the mists of creation, ferine in fury forlorn,
The wilderness reigneth malignant; and who may abide by its scorn,
Conquer the keeps of its splendour, looting the treasure it holds,
Damming its turbulent waters, rifling its forests and wolds,
Bridling its torrents with bridges, its mountain-cliffs battering down,
Turning its wastes to a garden, moulding its rocks to a town,
Flouting at famine and failure, sober to suffer and serve,
Staking their faith against danger in limitless daring and nerve,
Ne'er recking revenge nor repression, throttle the wild in its wrath,
Breaking the front of resistance unto the uttermost path?

And where shall you gather to dare it, men who are fearless and fit,
Primed with unquenchable courage, daring with Berserkir grit,
Freed from the cant of the city, purged of fastidious pride —
Men who will strive to a finish, men who are trusted and tried,
Emboldened by endless endeavour, steel-sinewed, brutish and wild —
Men with the tiger's insistence, and faith of an innocent child?
Go, seek them in pub and in model that steam with the stench of their shag,
Go, gather them up from the slumland and lure of the passionate hag,
Seek for the men of the highway, ragged, untutored and gaunt,
Men who can wrestle with horror and jeer at the terrors of want.
So one by one shall you gather them, one by one shall you send
Them over the pales of the city, where the roads that run outermost end.

And there in the primitive fastness, more like brutes than like men,
They're huddled in rat-riddled cabins, stuck in the feculent fen,
Where the red searing heat of the summer purges them drier than bone,
Where Medusa-faced winter in turn stiffens their limbs into stone.
Hemmed-up like fleas in the fissures, sweated like swine in the silt,
So that your deserts be conquered, so that your mansions be built;
Hair-poised on the joist or the copestone, and swept by the bellowing gales,
Hauling their burdens of granite, bearing their mortar-piled pails,
Pacing the tremulous gang-planks as the trestles are bent by the wind,
With death and danger before them, and danger and death behind.
Where torments that terribly threaten engirdle the path that they tread,
As their bedfellows drop at the jumper, the brains blown out of the head,
Where misfires, burst in the boring, cripple the men as they fly,
And the dark-clotted blood on the hammer shall tell of the deaths that they die;

The eyes that are gouged from their sockets, the scars on the cankerous face
Of the hairy and horrible human, who drops at the quarry's base;
The wild arms tossed to the heavens, as the outworks crumble beneath,
The curse of surprise and of horror that is hissed through the closen teeth,
The derricks that break at their pivots with the strain of the burden they bear,

Crushing the men at the windlass before they can utter a prayer;
The dams rushing wild in the darkness, and hurtling the flood-gates free,
The riotous rain-swollen rivers, that roll like an inland sea
Swamping the mud-rimed cabins, and breaking them up as they run,
Where men curse wild in the midnight, and die ere the rising sun —
Die in the rush of the freshets screaming in fury and fear,
As the timbers crunch in the torrent and jam in the glutted weir;
There, gulping the chalice of sorrow and chewing the crust of despair,
Thus do the slaves of the ages labour and dreadfully dare,
Gripping the forelock of failure and bearing the brunt of the fight,
For the crumbs that shall feed them at morning, the bunks that shall rest them
at night.

And there, stiff-lipped and enduring, stern-eyed, patient and rude,
Crushing the savage and sinister front of the lean solitude,
Unto the ultimate barrier, unto the ultimate breath,
Lashed with the scourge of oppression, swept by the legions of death,
They stumble like curs by the wayside, are flung in the ditch where they die,
With never a stone to record them under the pitiless sky;
Never a singer to chaunt them or tell of the deeds they have done,
The passionate hates that pursued them, the battles they fought in and won
—
How stark as the wilds where they labour, godlike they conquer or fall —
The courage, the dogged endeavour, the glory and woe of it all.

These are our serfs and our bondmen, slighted, forsaken, outcast,
Hewing the path of the future, heirs of the wrongs of the past,
Forespent in the vanguard of progress, vagrant, untutored, unskilled,
Labouring for ever and ever, so that our bellies be filled,
Building the homes of the haughty, rearing the mansions of worth —
Wanderers lost to the wide world, hell-harried slaves of the earth,
Visionless, dreamless, and voiceless children of worry and care,
Sweltering, straining and striving under the burdens they bear —
Stretches the future before them clouded and bleak as their past
They are our serfs and our — brothers, slighted, forsaken, outcast.





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