Pyres in the night, in the night! We need our powder — to kill. Pyres in the night, in the night! The glory of WAR! WAR AND PEACE Extract from Epilogue to Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava ALFRED TENNYSON I WOULD that wars should cease, My friends and brother souls, With all the peoples, great and small, To waste this earth began Perchance from some abuse of Will Involving ours-he needs must fight He needs must combat might with might, Nay tho' that realm were in the wrong For which her warriors bleed, It still were right to crown with song The warrior's noble deed. TRUE PEACE Extracts from Casa Guidi Windows ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING CHILDREN use the fist Until they are of age to use the brain; God's counsel, when a point was nearly missed, Until our generations should attain Christ's stature nearer. Not that we, alas, Attain already; but a single inch Will raise to look down on the swordsman's pass, As knightly Roland on the coward's flinch; And, after chloroform and ether-gas, We find out slowly what the bee and finch Have ready found, through Nature's lamp in each, How to our races we may justify Our individual claims and, as we reach Our own grapes, bend the top vines to supply Worth a great nation's finding, to prove weak And so with wide embrace, my England, seek To stifle the bad heat and flickerings Of this world's false and nearly expended fire! Draw palpitating arrows to the wood, And twang abroad thy high hopes and thy higher Till nations shall unconsciously aspire Instruct how clear calm eyes can overawe, No struggles toward encroachment, no vile war! Drums and battle-cries Go out in music of the morning-star And soon we shall have thinkers in the place The poet shall look grander in the face To sing "that Achillean wrath which slew So many heroes"), - seeing he shall treat The deeds of souls heroic toward the true, And awful like divine swans gliding through A cry is up in England, which doth ring The hollow world through, that for ends of trade And virtue and God's better worshiping, We henceforth should exalt the name of Peace And leave those rusty wars that eat the soul, Besides their clippings at our golden fleece. I, too, have loved peace, and from bole to bole Of immemorial undeciduous trees Would write, as lovers use upon a scroll, The holy name of Peace and set it high Where none could pluck it down. On trees, I say Not upon gibbets! though the vulture leaves Not upon dungeons! though the wretch who grieves And groans within, less stirs the outer air Than any little field-mouse stirs the sheaves. Nor yet on starving homes! where many a lip I love no peace which is not fellowship And which includes not mercy. I would have Rather the raking of the guns across The world, and shrieks against Heaven's architrave; Rather the struggle in the slippery fosse Of dying men and horses, and the wave Blood-bubbling . . Enough said! - by Christ's own cross, And by this faint heart of my womanhood, Such things are better than a Peace that sits Beside a hearth in self-commended mood, And takes no thought how wind and rain by fits Are howling out of doors against the good |