William Cowper, 'Slavery'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Slavery

O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear is pained,
My soul is sick, with every day’s report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the natural bond
Of brotherhood is severed as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colored like his own; and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And, worse than all, and most to be deplored,
As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.

By William Cowper
(English poet, 1731–1800)

A necessary dirge

[med_cat]

A NECESSARY DIRGE

Sometimes it's difficult, isn't it, not to grow grim and rancorous
Because man's fate is so counter-clockwise and cantankerous.
Look at all the noble projects that die a-borning,
Look how hard it is to get to sleep at night and then how hard it is to wake up in the morning!

How easy it is to be unselfish in the big things that never come up and
      how hard in the little things that come up daily and hourly, oh yes,
Such as what heroic pleasure to give up the last seat in a lifeboat to a mother and babe, and what
      irritation to give some housewife your seat on the Lexington Avenue Express!

How easy for those who do not bulge
To not overindulge!
O universe perverse, why and whence your perverseness?
Why do you not teem with betterness instead of worseness?

Do you get your only enjoyment
Out of humanity's annoyment?
Because a point I would like to discuss
Is, why wouldn't it be just as easy for you to make things easy for us?

But no, you will not listen, expostulation is useless,
Home is the fisherman empty-handed, home is the hunter caribouless and mooseless.
Humanity must continue to follow the sun around
And accept the eternal run-around.

Well, and if that be the case, why come on humanity!
So long as it is our fate to be irked all our life let us just keep our heads up and take our irking with insouciant urbanity.

(Ogden Nash)