Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, COMMENCEMENT POEM: 7, by EDWARD ROWLAND SILL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

COMMENCEMENT POEM: 7, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Well, the world is before us, - let us go forth and live
Last Line: Which the pale, dead lips of a truth smile back on a conquering lie.
Alternate Author Name(s): Hedbrooke, Andrew
Subject(s): Commencement


1

Well, the world is before us, -- let us go forth and live,
God's fair stars overhead, and the breath of God within,
Steadfast as we may amid the whirl and the din;
Let us challenge the fates, -- what answer do they give?

2

Work, work, work!
All action is noble and grand --
Whirling the wheel or tilling the land,
In the honest blows of the brawny hand
Is the kingliest crown of living won:
Work, work, work!

3

Ah! but the hollowness will lurk
Under the shell of all that is done.
Where is the labor so noble and great,
Among all vanities under the sun?
What is the grandeur of serving a state,
Whose tail is stinging its head to death like a scorpion?
To simper over a counter, to lie for a piece of coin,
To be shrewd and cunning, to cheat and steal,
Business-like and mercantile, --
An army of rats and foxes -- who will join?
Each little busy brain forever at work
Webbing out its mite of a plan,
Each hypocritical face with smile and smirk,
Thinking to mask its spleen from another man;
And then the apish mummery
Of the thing they call Society!
And its poor, sour fools that smiling stand,
With a smile that is overdone, --
With a hand that graspeth each man's hand,
And a heart that loveth none.
And the mills and shops whose dull routine
Turns God's image to a machine:
Oh! it makes one proud of our civilization --
Proud of a place in the noble nation,
Where a human soul --
A human soul --
Passes the years as they onward roll,
Making a million of heads for pins, or a thousand knives;
Such are the miracles men call lives!

4

No wonder, when the future is forgot,
If earth, and man, and all that being brings,
Seem but a blank, unmeaning blot,
That God has scattered, writing higher things,
And the soul, poor ghost!
So bitterly, bitterly tempest-tost,
So base and cowardly doth lie,
That it would give --
Ah! gladly give --
All this life that it dare not live,
To shun the death it dare not die.
Life -- poor thing -- that wastes its painful breath,
And walks the road that the fates have given,
Tossing its fettered hands to heaven,
Like an ironed criminal struggling and praying his way to death!

5

DISCONTENT

Oh, that one could arise and flee
Unto blue-eyed Italy,
Far from mechanical clank and hum!
There to sit by the sighing sea,
And to dream of the days that shall be -- shall be --
And the glory of years to come.
Or on some far ocean-isle,
Under the palm and the cocoa-tree,
To build of the coral boughs a home, --
Or floating and falling adown the Nile,
To drown one's cares in the deeps of Time
And the desert's brooding mystery.
Yet howsoever we plot or plan,
In every age -- through every clime --
Still the littleness of man
Would follow us, fast as we might flee:
And the wrangling world break in on whatever is tender and sweet,
As on a beautiful tune the rattling and noise of the street.

6

Oh, the world -- the world!
Mockery -- knavery -- cheat;
Down at your angry feet
Let the lying thing be hurled:
Worth no sorrowful tear or sob,
Worth not even a sigh;
But the scorn which a murdered purpose hurls on a butchering mob, --
Which the pale, dead lips of a truth smile back on a conquering lie.





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