Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, HIS CROWN OF SHAME (ON THE SINKING OF THE 'LUSITANIA'), by HENRY CHAPPELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

HIS CROWN OF SHAME (ON THE SINKING OF THE 'LUSITANIA'), by                    
First Line: Another gem to deck your crown of shame
Last Line: Hell's horrors pale before a prussian brain.
Subject(s): Disasters; Drowning; Grief; Heaven; Lusitania (ship); Shipwrecks; William Ii, Kaiser Of Germany (1859-1941; Sorrow; Sadness; Paradise


ANOTHER gem to deck your crown of shame,
Already spangled thick with hellish deeds;
Such bloody laurels plucked in Kultur's name
Sit well upon the ruffians that she breeds.
To you, such words as Pity, Shame or Ruth
Convey no meaning, human or divine;
To plead the sacred names of Right or Truth
Were casting pearls before a Prussian swine.

Poor shattered ark, I seem to see her die;
The gliding death, the blow, the thunder roar,
The riven plates and wreckage hurled on high,
The quivering body reeling, stricken sore.
One breath of awful silence, then the cries
Torn from a thousand tortured souls are rife,
And shiver upward to the quiet skies,
Fraught with a piteous strangled prayer for life.

Over she heels, and heeling flings the tide
Of poor humanity as atoms cast
Into the heaving waste, erst rode in pride
Therein to find an Ocean yet more vast.
Lower she sinks, the waters lap her deck,
Her gaping wounds in torrents suck the wave
That drags her down, a torn and dying wreck
To lie for ever in an ocean grave.

Thou sanguined fiend, in lowest deeps of hell
No devil's spawn conceived a fouler crime,
Nor arts infernal wove a blacker spell
Than thou, most callous scoundrel of all time.
Outside the human pale, no act too vile
For your black soul to fashion or obtain,
Hell's venom lags, outstripped by Prussian guile,
Hell's horrors pale before a Prussian brain.





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