Page:Rudyard Kipling's verse - Inclusive Edition 1885-1918.djvu/352

 Two hundred years and thirty

Ere Armageddon came

His single hand portrayed it,

And Bunyan was his name!

He mapped for those who follow,

The world in which we are—

"This famous town of Mansoul"

That takes the Holy War.

Her true and traitor people,

The gates along her wall,

From Eye Gate unto Feel Gate,

John Bunyan showed them all.

All enemy divisions,

Recruits of every class,

And highly-screened positions

For flame or poison-gas;

The craft that we call modern,

The crimes that we call new,

John Bunyan had 'em typed and filed

In sixteen Eighty-two.

Likewise the Lords of Looseness

That hamper faith and works,

The Perseverance-Doubters,

And Present-Comfort shirks,

With brittle intellectuals

Who crack beneath a strain—

John Bunyan met that helpful set

In Charles the Second's reign.

Emmanuel's vanguard dying

For right and not for rights,

My Lord Apollyon lying

To the State-kept Stockholmites,