"You are but children"
-
Egyptian
priest to
Solon
Red of the Dawn!
Screams of a babe in the
red-hot palms of a
Moloch of
Tyre,
Man with his brotherless
dinner on man in the
tropical wood,
Priests
in the name of the Lord passing
souls through fire to
the fire,
Head-hunters and
boats of
Dahomey that float upon human
blood.
Red of the Dawn!
Godless fury of peoples, and
Christless frolic of
kings,
And
the bolt of war dashing down upon cities and blazing farms,
For
Babylon was a child newborn, and
Rome was a babe in arms,
And
London and
Paris and all the rest are as yet but in leading strings.
Dawn not Day,
While
scandal is mouthing a bloodless name at
her cannibal feast,
And
rake-ruined bodies and souls go down in a common wreck,
And
the Press of a thousand cities is prized for it smells of
the beast,
Or easily violates
virgin Truth for a
coin or a
check.
Dawn not Day,
It is
Shame, so few should have climbed from the
dens in the level below,
Men, with a
heart and a
soul, no
slaves of a four-footed will?
But if twenty million of
summers are stored in the
sunlight still,
We are far from the
noon of man, there is time for the race to grow.
Red of the Dawn!
Is it turning a fainter red? So be it, but when shall we lay
The
Ghost of the
Brute that is walking and
haunting us yet, and be free?
In a hundred, a thousand
winters? Ah, what will
our children be?
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson