Albion’s coast is sick, silent.  The American meadows faint!

Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the
rivers, and mutter across the ocean.  France, rend down,
thy dungeon!

* * * * *

Look up! look up!  O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance!  O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine.  O African! black African!  Go, winged thought, widen his forehead!

* * * * *

With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts through
the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands,
glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay.

Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the
morning plumes her golden breast,

Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying:  Empire is no more! and now the lion and wolf shall cease.

  CHORUS

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy!  Nor his accepted brethren—­whom, tyrant, he calls free—­lay the bound or build the roof!  Nor pale Religion’s lechery call that virginity that wishes but acts not!

  For everything that lives is holy!

  THE FLY

  Little Fly,
  Thy summer’s play
  My thoughtless hand
  Has brushed away.

  Am not I
  A fly like thee? 
  Or art not thou
  A man like me?

  For I dance,
  And drink, and sing,
  Till some blind hand
  Shall brush my wing.

  If thought is life
  And strength and breath,
  And the want
  Of thought is death;

  Then am I
  A happy fly,
  If I live
  Or if I die.

  THE TIGER

  Tiger!  Tiger! burning bright
  In the forests of the night,
  What immortal hand or eye
  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies
  Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
  On what wings dare he aspire? 
  What the hand dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, and what art,
  Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
  And when thy heart began to beat,
  What dread hand? and what dread feet?

  What the hammer? what the chain? 
  In what furnace was thy brain? 
  What the anvil? what dread grasp
  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears,
  And watered heaven with their tears,
  Did he smile his work to see? 
  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  Tiger!  Tiger! burning bright
  In the forests of the night,
  What immortal hand or eye,
  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  HOLY THURSDAY

  Is this a holy thing to see
  In a rich and fruitful land,
  Babes reduced to misery,
  Fed with cold and usurous hand?