Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO DREYFUS VINDICATED, by ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO DREYFUS VINDICATED, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Soldier of justice, - fighting with her sword
Last Line: And he hath promised that he will repay.
Subject(s): Dreyfus, Alfred (1859-1935); Jews; Judaism


I

SOLDIER of Justice, -- fighting with her sword
Since thine was broken! Who need now despair
To lead a hope forlorn against the throng!
For what did David dare
Before Goliath worthy this compare --
Thou in the darkness fronting leagued wrong?
What true and fainting cause shall not be heir
Of all thy courage -- more than miser's hoard!
In times remote, when some preposterous Ill
Man has not yet imagined, shall be King,
While comfortable Freedom nods, --
And Three shall meet to slay the usurping thing,
Thy name recalled shall clinch their potent will,
And as they cry, "He won -- what greater odds!"
They shall become as gods.

II

Oh, what a star is one man's steadfastness,
To reckon from, to follow, and to bless!
Thou that didst late belong
To every land but France -- the unribboned
Knight
To whom her honor and thine own were one:
Now, on the morrow of thy faithful fight
When once more shines the sun
And all the weak are strong, --
No less we call thee ours
That thou art doubly hers, the while she showers
On thine unhumbled head
Her penitential laurels and her flowers,
As might we on one risen from the dead: --
France, generous at last,
Impassioned nobly to retrieve her passion overpast.

Ours, too, thy champions! Who shall dare to say
The sordid time doth lack of chivalry,
When men thus all renounce, all cast away,
To walk with martyrs through a flaming sea!
Picquart! -- how jealously will Life patrol
The paths of peril whither he is sent.
Zola! -- too early gone!
Whose taking even Death might well repent,
Though 't was to enrich that greater Pantheon
Where dwell the spirits of the brave of soul.

III

Yet doth thy triumph find its better part,
Soldier of Mercy, in thine own great heart,
That, in the vision of thy loneliest time,
Learned, like the poet, "All revenge is crime."
But though thine enemies may never feel
The gyves that with injustice mangled thee,
Pierced shall their souls be by a sharper steel --
The blade of conscience -- faultless weaponry!
Though, free from Law's reprisal,
They lie within no dank and sheathing cell
Where horror doth approximate to hell; --
Though they may never, near the brink of death,
Accuse with proud, pure hands the God of
Light; --
Yet is the day their night;
Yet is the world their prison, and their breath
But the slow poison of the world's despisal.
Leave them -- so deaf to pity -- unto Him
Who taught thee pity in thine exile caged and dim.

ENVOI

OH, tremble, all oppressors, where ye be --
Throne, senate, mansion, mart, or factory;
One against many, many against few;
Ye poor, once crushed, that crush your own anew;
Ye vulgar rich, new-risen from the mud,
Despoilers of the flower in the bud:
For justice is the orbit of God's day,
And He hath promised that He will repay.





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