Lady Jane Wilde: Verses about Food

Ark! the onward heavy tread
Hark! the voices rude
’Tis the famished cry for Bread
From a wildered multitude.

They come! They come!
Point the cannon—roll the drum;
Thousands wail and weep with hunger
Faster let your soldiers number.
Sword, and gun, and bayonet
A famished people’s cries have met.

Hark! the onward heavy tread
Hark! the voices rude—
’Tis the famished cry for Bread
From an armed multitude.
They come! They come!
Not with meek submission’s hum.
Bloody trophy they have won,
Ghastly glares it in the sun
Gory head on lifted pike.
Ha! they weep not now, but strike.

Ye, the deaf ones to their cries
Ye, who scorned their agonies
’Tis no longer prayers for bread
Shriek in your ears the famishéd;
But wildly, fiercely, peal on peal,
Resoundeth—Down with the Bastile!
Can ye tame a people now?
Try them—flatter, promise, vow,
Swear their wrongs shall be redressed
But patience—time will do the rest;
Swear they shall one day be fed
Hark! the People—Dead for Dead!

Calculating statesmen, quail;
Proud aristocrat, grow pale;
Savage sounds that deathly song:
Down with tyrants! Down with wrong!
Blindly now they wreak revenge
How rudely do a mob avenge!

What! coronetted Prince of Peer,
Will not the base‐born slavelings fear?
Sooth, their cry is somewhat stern:
Aristocrats, à la Lanterne!
Ghastly fruit their lances bear
Noble heads with streaming hair;
Diadem and kingly crown
Strike the famine‐stricken down.
Now, the People’s work is done
On they stride o’er prostrate throne;
Royal blood of King and Queen
Streameth from the guillotine;
Wildly on the people goeth,
Reaping what the noble soweth.
Little dreamed he, prince or peer,
Of who should be his heritor.
Hunger now, at last, is sated
In halls where once it wailed and waited;
Wild Justice fiercely rives the laws
Which failed to right a people’s cause.
On that human ocean floweth,
Whither stops it no one knoweth
Surge the wild waves in their strength
Against all chartered rights at length
Throne, and King, and Noble fall;
But the People—they hold Carnival!

None, unless the saints above,
Knew the secret of their love;
For with calm and stately grace
Isolde held her queenly place,
Tho’ the courtiers’ hundred eyes
Sought the lovers to surprise,
Or to read the mysteries
Of a love—so rumour said
By a magic philtre fed,
Which for ever in their veins
Burn’d with love’s consuming pains.
Yet their hands would twine unseen,
In a clasp ’twere hard to sever;
And whoso watched their glances meet,
Gazing as they’d gaze for ever,

Might have marked the sudden heat
Crims’ning on each flushing cheek,
As the tell‐tale blood would speak
Of love that never should have been
The love of Tristan and his Queen.
But, what hinders that the two,
In the spring of their young life,
Love each other as they do?
Thus the tempting thoughts begin
Little recked they of the sin;
Nature joined them hand in hand,
Is not that a truer band
Than the formal name of wife?
Ah! what happy hours were theirs!
One might note them at the feast
Laughing low to loving airs,
Loving airs that pleased them best;
Or interchanging the swift glance
In the mazes of the dance.
So the sunny moments rolled,
And they wove bright threads of gold
Through the common web of life;
Never dreaming of annoy,
Or the wild world’s wicked strife;
Painting earth and heaven above
In the light of their own joy,
In the purple light of love.
Happy moments, which again
Brought sweet torments in their train:
All love’s petulance and fears,
Wayward doubts and tender tears;
Little jealousies and pride,
That can loving hearts divide:
Murmured vow and clinging kiss,
Working often bane as bliss;
All the wild, capricious changes
Through which lovers’ passion ranges.

Yet would love, in every mood,
Find Heaven’s manna for its food;
For love will grow wan and cold,
And die ere ever it is old,
That is never assailed by fears,
Or steeped in repentant tears,
Or passed through the fire like gold.
So loved Tristan and Isolde,
In youth’s sunny, golden time,
In the brightness of their prime;
Little dreaming hours would come,
Like pale shadows from the tomb,
When an open death of doom
Had been still less hard to bear,
Than the ghastly, cold despair
Of those hidden vows, whose smart
Pale the cheek, and break the heart.

“A Million A Decade!” Calmly and cold
The units are read by our statesmen sage;
Little they think of a Nation old,
Fading away from History’s page;
Outcast weeds by a desolate sea
Fallen leaves of Humanity.

“A million a decade!”—of human wrecks,
Corpses lying in fever sheds
Corpses huddled on foundering decks,
And shroudless dead on their rocky beds;
Nerve and muscle, and heart and brain,
Lost to Ireland—lost in vain.

“A million a decade!” Count ten by ten,
Column and line of the record fair;
Each unit stands for ten thousand men,
Staring with blank, dead eye‐balls there;
Strewn like blasted trees on the sod,
Men that were made in the image of God.

“A million a decade!”—and nothing done;
The Cæsars had less to conquer a world;
And the war for the Right not yet begun,
The banner of Freedom not yet unfurled:
The soil is fed by the weed that dies;
If forest leaves fall, yet they fertilise.

But ye—dead, dead, not climbing the height,
Not clearing a path for the future to tread;
Not opening the golden portals of light,
Ere the gate was choked by your piled‐up dead:
Martyrs ye, yet never a name
Shines on the golden roll of Fame.

Had ye rent one gyve of the festering chain,
Strangling the life of the Nation’s soul;
Poured your life‐blood by river and plain,
Yet touched with your dead hand Freedom’s goal;
Left of heroes one footprint more
On our soil, tho’ stamped in your gore

We could triumph while mourning the brave,
Dead for all that was holy and just,
And write, through our tears, on the grave,
As we flung down the dust to dust
“They died for their country, but led
Her up from the sleep of the dead.”
VIII.
“A million a decade!” What does it mean?
A Nation dying of inner decay
A churchyard silence where life has been
The base of the pyramid crumbling away:
A drift of men gone over the sea,
A drift of the dead where men should be.

Was it for this ye plighted your word,
Crowned and crownless rulers of men?
Have ye kept faith with your crucified Lord,
And fed His sheep till He comes again?
Or fled like hireling shepherds away,
Leaving the fold the gaunt wolf’s prey?

Have ye given of your purple to cover,
Have ye given of your gold to cheer,
Have ye given of your love, as a lover
Might cherish the bride he held dear,
Broken the Sacrament‐bread to feed
Souls and bodies in uttermost need?

Ye stand at the Judgment‐bar to‐day
The Angels are counting the dead‐roll, too;
Have ye trod in the pure and perfect way,
And ruled for God as the crowned should do?
Count our dead—before Angels and Men,
Ye’re judged and doomed by the Statist’s pen.

Weary men, what reap ye? —Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? —Human corses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger‐stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing.
There's a proud array of soldiers—what do they round your door?
They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? —Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.

Little children, tears are strange upon your infant faces,
God meant you but to smile within your mother's soft embraces.
Oh! we know not what is smiling, and we know not what is dying;
But we're hungry, very hungry, and we cannot stop our crying.
And some of us grow cold and white—we know not what it means;
But, as they lie beside us, we tremble in our dreams.
There's a gaunt crowd on the highway—are ye come to pray to man,
With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words your faces wan?

No; the blood is dead within our veins—we care not now for life;
Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife;


We cannot stay and listen to their raving, famished cries
Bread! Bread! Bread! and none to still their agonies.
We left our infants playing with their dead mother's hand:
We left our maidens maddened by the fever's scorching brand:
Better, maiden, thou were strangled in thy own dark‐twisted tresses—
Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mother's first caresses.


We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear our groan;
Yet, if fellow‐men desert us, will He hearken from His Throne?
Accursed are we in our own land, yet toil we still and toil;
But the stranger reaps our harvest—the alien owns our soil.
O Christ! how have we sinned, that on our native plains
We perish houseless, naked, starved, with branded brow, like Cain's?
Dying, dying wearily, with a torture sure and slow
Dying, as a dog would die, by the wayside as we go.

One by one they're falling round us, their pale faces to the sky;
We've no strength left to dig them graves—there let them lie.
The wild bird, if he's stricken, is mourned by the others,
But we—we die in Christian land—we die amid our brothers,
In the land which God has given, like a wild beast in his cave,
Without a tear, a prayer, a shroud, a coffin, or a grave.
Ha! but think ye the contortions on each livid face ye see,
Will not be read on judgment‐day by eyes of Deity?


We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure—bask ye in the world's caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin'd masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we'll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.