Classic Poem

The poor! God help them, the suffering poor!
In this time of storm and cold,
When chill winds rattle their rickety door,
And enter their tenements old.
Oh, little we know of their want and woe,
Of their scanty table and hearth;
How they shiver and shrink, while the dreary snow
Puts a shroud on the frozen earth.

Hark! voices are in the winds to-night,
And they tell us a dismal tale
Of the weary and worn with the hunger-blight,
And the poor man's piteous wail.
Full many a shriek, on their pinions bleak,
They carry about the air,
From the heart of the strong, by want made weak,
And manacled by despair.

There 's a stifled groan from a dwelling lone,
Where fatherless children live,
And the mother hears her infant moan,
But oh! she has nothing to give!
'T would rend your heart, that widow's cry,
Who watcheth their scanty bed,
With her hollow cheek and sunken eye,
And her husband with the dead.

Oh, her heart will break for her children's sake,
In that house without food or fire,
For not a crumb of their crust will she take
Lest her little ones starve entire.
And dying they are, in our very sight,
Of hunger, and cold, and sorrow:
We must take some bread to that house to-night,
Or take out a corpse to-morrow.

The poor are God's poor! And Christian men,
God's almoners are ye!
Then as you receive, so give again
God's bountiful charity.
Let it not be said that ye keep God's bread,
And hoard His silver and gold,
While ye leave the suffering poor unfed,
And perishing with the cold.