Ella Wheeler Wilcox – Woman And War

We women teach our little sons how wrong

And how ignoble blows are; school and church

Support our precepts and inoculate

The growing minds with thoughts of love and peace.

‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite, ’ we say;

But human beings with immortal souls

Must rise above the methods of the brute

And walk with reason and with self-control.

And then – dear God! you men, you wise, strong men,

Our self-announced superiors in brain,

Our peers in judgement, you go forth to war!

You leap at one another, mutilate

And starve and kill your fellow men, and ask

The world’s applause for such heroic deeds.

You boast and strut; and if no song is sung,

No laudatory epic writ in blood,

Telling how many widows you have made,

Why then, penforce, you say our bards are dead

And inspiration sleeps to wake no more.

And we, the women, we whose lives you are –

What can we do but sit in silent homes

And wait and suffer? Not for us the blare

Of trumpets and the bugle’s call to arms –

For us no waving banners, no supreme,

Triumphant hour of conquest. Ours the slow

Dread torture of uncertainty, each day

The bootless battle with the same despair.

And when at best your victories reach our ears,

There reaches with them to our pitying hearts

The thought of countless homes made desolate

And other women weeping for their dead.

O men, wise men, superior beings, say,

Is there no substitute for war in this

Great age and ere? If you answer ‘No’

Then let us rear our children to be wolves

And teach them from the cradle how to kill.

Why should we women take waste our time and work

In talking peace, when men declare for war?

Ella Wheeler Wilcox – By-And-Bye

‘By-and-bye, ’ the maiden sighed – ‘by-and-bye

He will claim me for his bride,

Hope is strong and time is fleet;

Youth is fair, and love is sweet,

Clouds will pass that fleck my sky,

He will come back by-and-bye.’

‘By-and-bye, ’ the soldier said – ‘by-and-bye,

After I have fought and bled,

I shall go home from the wars,

Crowned with glory, seamed with scars,

Joy will flash from some one’s eye

When she greets me by-and-bye- by-and-bye.’

‘By-and-bye, ’ the mother cried – ‘by-and-bye,

Strong and sturdy at my side,

Like a staff supporting me,

Will my bonnie baby be.

Break my rest, then, wail and cry –

Thou’lt repay me by-and-bye - by-and-bye.’

Fleeting years of time have sped – hurried by –

Still the maiden is unwed:

All unknown soldier lies,

Buried under alien skies;

And the son, with blood-shot eye,

Saw his mother starve and die.

God in heaven! dost Thou on high

Keep the promised ‘by-and-bye’ - by-and-bye?

Sylvia Plath – April Aubade

Worship this world of watercolor mood

in glass pagodas hung with veils of green

where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood

and sap ascends the steeple of the vein.

A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals

to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,

while tulips bow like a college of cardinals

before that papal paragon, the sun.

Christened in a spindrift of snowdrop stars,

where on pink-fluted feet the pigeons pass

and jonquils sprout like solomon's metaphors,

my love and I go garlanded with grass.

Again we are deluded and infer

that somehow we are younger than we were.

James Oppenheim – The Slave

They set the slave free, striking off his chains…

Then he was as much of a slave as ever.

He was still chained to servility,

He was still manacled to indolence and sloth,

He was still bound by fear and superstition,

By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery…

His slavery was not in the chains,

But in himself….

They can only set free men free…

And there is no need of that:

Free men set themselves free.

Rabindranath Tagore – Little Of Me

Let only that little be left of me

whereby I may name thee my all.

Let only that little be left of my will

whereby I may feel thee on every side,

and come to thee in everything,

and offer to thee my love every moment.

Let only that little be left of me

whereby I may never hide thee.

Let only that little of my fetters be left

whereby I am bound with thy will,

and thy purpose is carried out in my life

and that is the fetter of thy love.