Page:Poems (1915) G K Chesterton.djvu/117



SLEEPY people, without priests or kings,

Dreamed here, men say, to drive us to the sea:

O let us drive ourselves! For it is free

And smells of honour and of English things.

How came we brawling by these bitter springs,

We of the North?—two kindly nations—we?

Though the dice rattles and the clear coin rings,

Here is no place for living men to be.

Leave them the gold that worked and whined for it,

Let them that have no nation anywhere

Be native here, and fat and full of bread;

But we, whose sins were human, we will quit

The land of blood, and leave these vultures there,

Noiselessly happy, feeding on the dead.