Page:Poetry's plea for animals; an anthology (IA poetryspleaforan00clar).pdf/17

Rh and wrote The Titmouse; and in Forbearance, he asks his reading public: "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?" But not till the twentieth century is the humane cause consummated in both British and American poetry. In England, Arthur Symons proclaims:
 * “——When I hear

Crying of oxen, that, in deadly fear, Rough men, with cruel dogs about them, drive Into the torture-house of death alive. How can I sit under a tree and read A happy idle book, and take no heed?" Ralph Hodgson defines his attitude toward the world’s unthinking cruelty in his lovely lyric, Stupidity Street: And again in The Bells of Heaven:
 * "I saw with open eyes
 * Singing birds sweet
 * Sold in the shops
 * For the people to eat,
 * Sold in the shops of
 * Stupidity Street.
 * I saw in vision
 * The worm in the wheat,
 * And in the shops nothing
 * For people to eat;
 * Nothing for sale in
 * Stupidity Street.”
 * " 'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
 * The wildest peal for years.
 * If Parson lost his senses
 * And people came to theirs,
 * And he and they together
 * Knelt down with angry prayers
 * For tamed and shabby tigers
 * And dancing dogs and bears.
 * And wretched, blind pit ponies,
 * And little hunted hares.”