Classic Poem

I.

Close at the edge of a busy town,
A huge quadrangular mansion stands;
Its rooms are all filled with the parish poor;
Its walls are all built by pauper hands;
And the pauper old and the pauper young
Peer out, through the grates, in sullen bands.

II.

Behind, is a patch of earth, by thorns
Fenced in from the moor's wide marshy plains;
By the side, is a gloomy lane, that steals
To a quarry now filled with years of rains:
But within, within! There Poverty scowls,
Nursing in wrath her brood of pains.

III.

Enter and look! In the high-walled yards
Fierce men are pacing the barren ground:
Enter the long bare chambers; — girls
And women are sewing, without a sound;
Sewing from dawn till the dismal eve,
And not a laugh or a song goes round.

IV.

No communion — no kind thought
Dwells in the pauper's breast of care;
Nothing but pain in the grievous past;
Nothing to come but the black despair —
Of bread in prison, bereft of friends,
Or Hunger, out in the open air!

V.

Where is the bright-haired girl, that once
With her peasant sire was used to play?
Where is the boy whom his mother blessed,
Whose eyes were a light on her weary way?
Apart — barred out (so the law ordains;)
Barred out from each other by night and day.

VI.

Letters they teach in their infant schools;
But where are the lessons of great God taught?
Lessons that child to the parent bind —
Habits of duty — love unbought?
Alas! small good will be learned in schools
Where Nature is trampled and turned to nought.

VII.

Seventeen summers, and where the girl
Who never grew up at her father's knee?
Twenty autumnal storms have nursed
The pauper's boyhood, and where is he?
She earneth her bread in the midnight lanes:
He toileth in chains by the Southern Sea.

VIII.

O Power! O Prudence! Law! — look down
From your heights on the pining poor below!
O sever not hearts which God hath joined
Together, on earth, for weal and woe!
O Senators grave, grave truths may be,
Which ye have not learned, or deigned to know.

IX.

O Wealth, come forth with an open hand!
O Charity, speak with a softer sound!
Yield pity to Age — to tender Youth —
To Love, wherever its home be found!
... But I cease , — for I hear, in the night to come,
The cannon's blast, and the rebel drum,
Shaking the firm-set English ground!