Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/27

 Of far calamities, and wars, and myriads slain.

Our life is one with theirs,

We may not fling them down the blood-stained stairs

And grades of being brutally

And break away and all unhindered mount.

They cling about our hems tenaciously;

Their cries unnerve our ardour.

We needs must take account

That to earth's farthest cape man is his brother's warder.

Man has one soul and where aught human's ill

Its far contagion blasts each member still;

Yet he will die

Who his own self with all will not identify,

Scorning to know life else than at its worst,

With the disdained, disdained, with the accursed, accursed;

Dreading the most in his full misery

The accusing eyes of those who suffered more than he:

Therefore that One

Who most was man, shrank from the shame

Of any lot less shameful than another's,

Fearing the ignominy of a name

Less ignominious than some human brother's,

That none

Might claim before Him to know well

The trancèd tortures of some deeper hell,

Or cast reproachful glances from a fiercer cross,

Asking in vain for faith in some more hopeless loss,

And hope for some more desperate enterprise,

And love for some more utter sacrifice.

Therefore rejecting the cerulean bliss

He sought the corrupt abyss;

Revolted by the wrongs

Of those whose loathed immunities He shared,

Dreading the direr fate of isolation

And gradual alienation

From man and his millennial exultation, 21