Poem: Sonnet To Liberty

Poem: Sonnet To Liberty

 

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes

See nothing save their own unlovely woe,

Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know, -

But that the roar of thy Democracies,

Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,

Mirror my wildest passions like the sea

And give my rage a brother -!  Liberty!

For this sake only do thy dissonant cries

Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings

By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades

Rob nations of their rights inviolate

And I remain unmoved - and yet, and yet,

These Christs that die upon the barricades,

God knows it I am with them, in some things.