Classic Poem

The crowded room was rank with smoke
And raw with fumes of drink.
The air was harsh with curse and joke;
How could you else than shrink?

Was this, then, life? You could not know
That evil was not king,
And the savage law of blow for blow
Was not the only thing.

For you had dwelt in youthful dreams,
Ethereal regions fair
Of starlight meads and moonlight streams
Untouched by grief and care.

You loved to war with cleansing seas,
You loved all kindly mirth,
You people with sweet phantasies
Our sordid modern earth.

Your playtime done, you gladly strove
To act a true man's part,
You were but plunged amid the drove
Of tramplers in the mart.

And then came war. You volunteered,
Aflame for nobler strife.
With hero soul, no foe you feared.
“Ah! here,” you said, “is life.”

They chained your spirit in the grime
Of dreary camp routine,
And two men pulled you toward the slime
Where even love is unclean.

“We'll make a man of you,” they cried,
And jeered with taunting yell.
“You won't? All right then, damn your pride!
We'll make your life a hell.”

They kept their promise well, the two;
They know, and God knows, how.
They tortured, poisoned, murdered you.
May God forgive them now!

For weeks and months with rankling art
They probed you to the quick.
They saw you writhe at each new smart
Till all your soul was sick.

The tiny room was thick with smoke
And raw with fumes of drink.
From foulest curse and filthiest joke
You could not else than shrink.

Your strength, your hate were for the foe.
Half-mad there at the end,
You were not nerved to strike a blow
And kill a should-be friend.

Then suddenly you saw the lands
Where poet souls belong,
Where rules a Power that understands,
Where comes no taint of wrong.

You saw your spirit's homeland there,
Still lovely, still the same.
You, all too gentle, all too rare
To learn life as it came,
You could no longer breathe the air
Of fetid lust and shame.

You did not well. But you were not,
As we are, slowly steeled
To bear the ills our fates allot.
You broke, you could not yield.

The room was hell and life was hell,
But there so near outside
Was your own world where moonbeams dwell
On dream-fields soft and wide.

You did but seek your own once more;
You fled the garish light.
You raised the latch-pin, swung the door,
And stepped into the night.