Iii

Seek him yet. Search for him! You shall find him, spent and grim; In the prisons, where we pen These unsightly shards of men. Sheltered fast; Housed at length; Clothed and fed, no matter how!-- Where the householders, aghast, Measure in his broken strength Nought but power for evil, now. Beast-of-burden drudgeries Could not earn him what was his: He who heard the world applaud Glories seized by force and fraud, He must break,--he must take!-- Both for hate and hunger's sake. He must seize by fraud and force; He must strike, without remorse! Seize he might; but never keep. Strike, his once!--Behold him here. (Human life we buy so cheap, Who should know we held it dear?)

No denial,--no defence From a brain bereft of sense, Any more than penitence. But the heart-beats now, that plod Goaded--goaded--dumb with wrong, Ask not even a ghost of God ............._How long_?

_When the Sea gives up its dead, Prison caverns, yield instead This, rejected and despised; This, the Soiled and Sacrificed! Without form or comeliness; Shamed for us that did transgress; Bruised, for our iniquities, With the stripes that are all his! Face that wreckage, you who can. It was once the Singing Man._