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DAWN BEHIND NIGHT, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Lips! Bold, frenzied utterance, shape to the thoughts that prompted by hate
Last Line: That will find us and free us and take us where its portals are opened wide.
Subject(s): Death; Soldiers; War; Dead, The


Lips! bold, frenzied utterance, shape to the thoughts that are prompted by hate
Of the red streaming burden of wrong we have borne and still bear;
That wealth with its soul-crushing scourges placed into its hands by fate,
Hath made the cement of its towers, grim-girdled by our despair.

Should it die in the death that they make, in the silence that follows the sob;
In the voiceless depth of the waters that closes upon our grief;
Who shall know of the bleakness assigned us for the fruits that we reap and they

rob?
To pour out the strong wine of pity, outstretch the kind hand in relief.

In the golden glare of the morning, in the solemn serene of the night,
We look on each other's faces, and we turn to our prison bar;
In pitiless travail of toil and outside the precious light,
What wonder we know not our manhood in the curse of the things that are?

In the life or the death they dole us from the rags and the bones of their
store,
In the blood they feed but to drink of, in the pity they feign in their pride,
Lies the glimpse of a heaven behind it, for the ship hath left the shore,
That will find us and free us and take us where its portals are opened wide.





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