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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Antagonists
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I
 Caverns mouthed with blackness more than night,
 Fever--jungle deep in strangling brier,
 Venom--breeding slime that loathest light,
 Who has plumbed your secret? who the blind desire
 Hissing from the viper`s lifted jaws,
 Maddening the beast with scent of prey
 Tracked through savage glooms on robber paws
 Till the slaughter gluts him red and reeking? Nay,
 Man, this breathing mystery, this intense
 Body beautiful with thinking eyes,
 Master of a spirit outsoaring sense,
 Spirit of tears and laughter, who has measured all the skies,--
 Is he also the lair
 Of a lust, of a sting
 That hides from the air
 Yet is lurking to spring
 From the nescient core
 Of his fibre, alert
 At the trumpet of war
 And hungry to hurt,
 When he hears from abysses of time
 Aboriginal mutters, replying
 To something he knew not within him,
 And the Demon of Earth crying:

 ``I am the will of the Fire
 That bursts into boundless fury;
 I am my own implacable desire.

 ``I am the will of the Sea
 That shoulders the ships and breaks them;
 There is none other but me.``

 Heavy forests bred them,
 The race that dreamed.
 In the bones of savage earth
 Their dreams had birth:
 Darkness fed them.
 And the full brain grossly teemed
 With thoughts compressed, with rages
 Obstinate, stark, obscure--
 Thirsts no time assuages,
 But centuries immure.
 As the sap of trees, behind
 Crumpled bark of bossy boles,
 Presses up its juices blind,
 Buried within their souls
 The dream insatiate still
 Nursed its fierceness old
 And violent will,
 Haunted with twilight where the Gods drink full
 Ere they renew their revelry of slaying,
 And warriors leap like the lion on the bull,
 And harsh horns in the northern mist are braying.
 Tenebrous in them lay the dream
 Like a fire that under ashes
 Smoulders heavy--heaped and dim
 Yet with spurted stealthy flashes
 Sends a goblin shadow floating
 Crooked on the rafters--then
 Sudden from its den
 Springs in splendour. So should burst
 Destiny from dream, from thirst
 Rapture gloating
 On a vision of earth afar
 Stretched for a prize and a prey;
 And the secular might of the Gods re--risen
 Savage and glorious, waiting its day,
 Should shatter its ancient prison
 And leap like the panther to slay,
 Magnificent! Storm, then, and thunder
 The haughty to crush with the tame,
 For the world is the strong man`s plunder
 Whose coming is swifter than flame;
 And the nations unready, decayed,
 Unworthy of fate or afraid,
 Shall be stricken and torn asunder
 Or yield in shame.

 The Dream is fulfilled.
 Is it this that you willed,
 O patient ones?
 For this that you gave
 Young to the grave
 Your valiant sons?
 For this that you wore
 Brave faces, and bore
 The burden heart--breaking--
 Sublimely deceived,
 You that bled and believed--
 For the Dream? or the Waking?


II
 No drum--beat, pulsing challenge and desire,
 Sounded, no jubilant boast nor fierce alarm
 Cried throbbing from enfevered throats afire
 For glory, when from vineyard, forge, and farm,
 From wharf and warehouse, foundry, shop, and school,
 From the unreaped cornfield and the office--stool
 France called her sons; but loth, but grave,
 But silent, with their purpose proud and hard
 Within them, as of men that go to guard
 More than life, yet to dare
 More than death: France, it was their France to save!
 Nor now the fiery legend of old fames
 And that imperial Eagle whose wide wings
 Hovered from Vistula to Finistère,
 Who plucked the crown from Kings,
 Filled her; but France was arming in her mind:
 The world unborn and helpless, not the past
 Victorious with banners, called her on;
 And she assembled not her sons alone
 From city and hamlet, coast and heath and hill,
 But deep within her bosom, deeper still
 Than any fear could search, than any hope could blind,
 Beyond all clamours of her recent day,
 Hot smouldering of the faction and the fray,
 She summoned her own soul. In the hour of night,
 In the hush that felt the armed tread of her foes,
 Like a star, silent out of seas, it rose.

 Most human France! In those clear eyes of light
 Was vision of the issue, and all the cost
 To the last drop of generous blood, the last
 Tears of the orphan and the widow; and yet
 She shrank not from the terror of the debt,
 Seeing what else were with the cause undone,
 The very skies barred with an iron threat,
 The very mind of freedom lost
 Beneath that shadow bulked across the sun.
 Therefore did she abstain
 From all that had renowned her, all that won
 The world`s delight: thought--stilled
 With deep reality to the heart she burned,
 And took upon her all the load of pain
 Foreknown; and her sons turned
 From wife`s and children`s kiss
 Simply, and steady--willed
 With quiet eyes, with courage keen and clear,
 Faced Eastward.--If an English voice she hear,
 That has no speech worthy of her, let this
 Be of that day remembered, with what pride
 Our ancient island thrilled to the oceans wide,
 And our hearts leapt to know that England then,
 Equal in faith of free and loyal men,
 Stept to her side.
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