Theirs is a woful fate; God help the Poor!
Their hands are fettered, and their hearts are faint;
Gaunt Famine and grim Death stand at their door,
Yet Mercy hears not their weak lips' complaint.
It is their lot to starve, their doom to die
Unhelped, unwatched, unwept—let them not groan!
No pitying ear is open to their cry;
And mute, stern, prayerless, they die alone.
Want has no form of sorrow I saw not:
From the meek wretch who uncomplaining dies,
Leaving his tombless bones to mark the spot,
To him whom want makes mad, and who defies
Lawgivers and the law to bind his head
To perish in the dust, but with a stroke
Of his offending arm obtains his bread,
And bursts his chain, and tramples on his yoke;
From the soft child, new-born, whose little wail,
Ere it too perished, was the only grief
The world vouchsafed to her who, faint and frail,
Had agonized and died without relief,
To the old man on whom the numbing snows
Of winter and of age were falling cold,
When one fierce night Death added up his woes,
And all the old man's years and griefs were told;
From the strong, breaking heart of honest pride,
To the mean, willing suppliant for bread,
I saw Want's victims through my slumber glide,
And heard the rustle of Death's wings outspread,
'Till gradually, as a cloud doth change,
A change came o'er the creatures of my dream,
And wild, fantastic shapes, grotesque and strange,
Made the dark vapor of my vision teem.
They were all shades of those who died of want,
By thousands risen from their nameless graves,
