How Weary Is Our Heart

Of kings and courts; of kingly, courtly ways In which the life of man is bought and sold; How weary is our heart these many days!

Of ceremonious embassies that hold Parley with Hell in fine and silken phrase, How weary is our heart these many days!

Of wavering counsellors neither hot nor cold, Whom from His mouth God speweth, be it told How weary is our heart these many days!

Yea, for the ravelled night is round the lands, And sick are we of all the imperial story. The tramp of Power, and its long trail of pain; The mighty brows in meanest arts grown hoary; The mighty hands, That in the dear, affronted name of Peace Bind down a people to be racked and slain; The emulous armies waxing without cease, All-puissant all in vain; The pacts and leagues to murder by delays, And the dumb throngs that on the deaf thrones gaze; The common loveless lust of territory; The lips that only babble of their mart, While to the night the shrieking hamlets blaze; The bought allegiance, and the purchased praise, False honour, and shameful glory;-- Of all the evil whereof this is part, How weary is our heart, How weary is our heart these many days!

Another poem I cite in full, not for its power and beauty, but as a curiosity. I do not think it has been remembered that in the New Poems of 1909 Mr. Watson published a poem of Hate some years before the Teutonic hymn became famous. It is worth reading again, because it so exactly expresses the cold reserve of the Anglo-Saxon, in contrast with the sentimentality of the German. There is, of course, no indication that its author had Germany in mind.