Page:Fifes and Drums, Poems of America at War, Vigilantes, 1917.djvu/77



have not willed this war,

Nor heaped for man this monstrous pyre,

But we have sought on hell's wide shore

To quench the awful fire.

This war was willed to be

By one who sprang on a world asleep,

And now his talons out of the sea

Have drawn us in to the deep:

In to the deep and the dark

Where his blood is drunk with the splendor of ships,

As he lies in lair with a steel-gray shark—

The mad foam on his lips.