They are marching on Herat, half a million men, or more, Over the frontier they’re swarming; And they do not seem to mind at all my remonstrative roar, But grin as if its melody were charming; Turk and Italian, Teuton and Gaul, Friends of the past, where, where are ye all? Great Patience! are ye laughing at the poor old lion’s fall? Really, the prospect is alarming.
’Tis useless boasting now we can whip them one to ten, Woe is me! the fact is quite contrary; We might when “English” soldiers came from Irish hill and glen, But there’s no recruiting now in Tipperary. No, nor from Antrim downward to Clare, From seaboard of Galway across to Kildare, Can I find a single Irishman to help me anywhere, Except he be a Corydon or Carey.
Oh dear, oh kind, oh glorious, oh darling Uncle Sam, Am I not your father and your mother? Pray listen to the bleatings of the martyred British lamb, Help, brave soul, oh help, before I smother. Irving and Arnold your culture will bless, All the dudes of London your image will caress, Oscar go across again to teach you how to dress, And we’ll be the world to one another.
Bennett, Smalley, don’t you hear the marching going on? The tramp my Indian provinces is shaking, Greycoats from the Ural and Cossacks from the Don, Is it any wonder that I’m quaking? O Lord! the tortures, the terrors I feel! Even my roar has been changed to a squeal, And--my heart to palsy, my very blood congeal-- That d--d old Irish wolf-dog is awaking!
TO THE IRISH DEAD WHO WERE SLAUGHTERED DURING THE FIFTY YEARS’ REIGN OF VICTORIA, QUEEN OF ENGLAND.
We meet to-night to greet a name Symbolical for fifty years Of England’s guilt and England’s shame, Of Ireland’s blood and Ireland’s tears. To mingle with the empty glee Of laugh and cheer from English throat, A new tone in this Jubilee,-- A strong, discordant, Irish note.
What has she done for us or ours; What wrong redressed; relieved what pain; That in her garlanding of flowers We should conceal our Irish chain? When on the dreary roadside lying Were babe and mother faint and dying, When heaped were nameless Irish graves, When Irish dead paved ocean’s waves, When every blast That swept the mast Of fever ship was moaning, sighing The story of an awful crime That ringing down the aisles of Time Has filled the universe with song-- A deathless dirge of Ireland’s wrong-- What act of mercy, gentle, human, What deed of grace to prove her woman, What sign gave she that Irish true man Could treasure in his heart to be A token of her Jubilee?