Classic Poem

A thousand creeds and battle-cries,
A thousand warring social schemes,
A thousand new moralities,
And twenty thousand thousand dreams!

Each on his own anarchic way,
From the old order breaking free,--
Our ruined world desires, you say,
Licence, once more, not Liberty.

But ah, beneath the struggling foam,
When storm and change are on the deep,
How quietly the tides come home,
And how the depths of sea-shine sleep;

And we who march towards a goal,
Destroying only to fulfil
The law, the law of that great soul
Which moves beneath your alien will;

We, that like foemen meet the past
Because we bring the future, know
We only fight to achieve at last
A great re-union with our foe;

Re-union in the truths that stand
When all our wars are rolled away;
Re-union of the heart and hand
And of the prayers wherewith we pray;

Re-union in the common needs,
The common strivings of mankind;
Re-union of our warring creeds
In the one God that dwells behind.

Then--in that day--we shall not meet
Wrong with new wrong, but right with right;
Our faith shall make your faith complete
When our battalions re-unite.

Forward!--what use in idle words?--
Forward, O warriors of the soul!
There will be breaking up of swords
When that new morning makes us whole.