Classic Poem

What frightful things the City dares to do!
She draws us to her heart, as mothers will,
And nurses us till we are part of her—
Then laughs, and makes our childhood bleak and old,
Our youth a lonely flower that starves upon
The iron breast we thought would nourish it.
She leaves us—pitiless Mother!—to control
In helplessness our destiny; forgets
Her children who have come to her, so filled
With beautiful illusions and white dreams.
Unnatural monster!—thus to succor us,
Thus treacherously to catch us in her snare,
To make us love her so we dare not fly
Back to the wind-swept spaces of the West,
Or the cool, valiant mornings of the North,
Or the warm, dripping, singing lanes we left
In the good Southern country. Utterly
She owns us, as a bondsman owns his slaves,
Exulting in their servitude; and we
Dare not rebel. Rather, we learn to love
The very hand that smites us! And we cling
To the great marble arms enfolding us,
And nestle closer, closer every day!

This is the iron City's awful way—
Not wilfully to crush our bodies down
Beneath her agate heel; but day by day
To choke us with wild loneliness; to drown
Our hearts and hopes—yet never quite to slay.

This is her manner with the sons of men—
To torture us until we bleed with pain;
Yet once her fingers clutch us, futile then
Our hope to wipe away their crimson stain;
Nay, like poor hounds, we kiss her hand again!

She dares to fling us in her frightful tides,
Not knowing whether we can breast the waves;
She hurls us in her seething ocean, there
To fight the perilous currents as we may.
And some go down; and some, on lonely isles
Find shelter that is even worse than death.
They hear the waves—yet dare not face again
Their mighty force; and sundered from the souls
They hoped to make their brothers, they grow old
In the bleak isolation that they know.
Like lonesome rocks set in the City's sea,
Are the stone dwellings man himself has reared;
And two poor outcasts, lashed by the same storm
Of bitter circumstance, may live for years
Close to each other—yet a world apart,
Braving the same storms of adversity,
Knowing the same relentless solitude,
Yet fearing to reveal one piteous sign. …
What frightful things the City dares to do!