Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, IN A TIME OF WAR: 3. THE DESECRATED DREAM, by THOMAS STURGE MOORE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

IN A TIME OF WAR: 3. THE DESECRATED DREAM, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: With every mighty nation now at war
Last Line: Still seeks worse ways to slay and to be slain.
Alternate Author Name(s): Moore, T. Sturge
Subject(s): World War I; First World War


WITH every mighty nation now at war,
While hideous cannon shatter works of art
And break young men, whose disguised fair forms are
Compelled to crouch in burrows, whence they start
Only to run on death with terror's strength,
Drab demons of a tract of stench and mud
Where spiked iron ropes of any length
Writhe like fierce snakes, and all about them thud
Huge iron crocks charged with the pent-up rage
Of many thousand weary aching slaves,
Born into toil, shut like an artful cage
Where life must pine on hope that never saves:
Feeling and knowing this I long to stray
Naked and wild by some Pacific bay.

How all the patience of the soul is claimed
Watching this loathsome quarrel wreck the world!
Man's timid flesh is for his proud thought shamed
Since it invents new engines to be hurled
Against his easily unseated life
Though that agree best with the tenderest ways
Of wave and breeze, of leaf and child and wife.
I pine for naked freedom in some place
Where ocean whispers to a fragrant shore,
Where trees hide oranges with orange flower,
And birds such plumes shed that bride needs not more
Dainty tiara for her long hair shower.
Yet the hard tenant of this soft domain
Still seeks worse ways to slay and to be slain.





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