Michael or St. George
With the bright death to cleave the monster's gorge,
And trample out the Laidly Worm's last breath
In the convulsions of reluctant death.
A crawling, craven, sneaking, snaking brute;
Purposeless spite, and hatred absolute,
In hideous shape incarnate! Venomed Gad
In Civilisation's path; malignant-mad,
And blindly biting; raising an asp-neck
In Beauty's foot-tracks, and prepared to wreck
The ordered work of ages in a day,
To raze and shatter, to abase and slay.
Blind as the earthquake, headlong as the storm,
Yet in such hideous subter-human form,
Vulgar as venomous! Dragon indeed,
And dangerous, but with no soul save greed,
No aim save chaos. Bloody, yet so blind,
The common enemy of humankind;
Whose age-stored works and ways it yearns to blast,
To smite to ruined fragments, and to cast
Prone--as itself is prone--in common dust.
The Beautiful, the Wise, the Strong, the Just,
All fruit of labour, and all spoil of thought,
All that co-operant Man hath won or wrought,
All that the heart has loved, the mind has taught
Through the long generations, hoarded gains
Of plastic fancies, and of potent brains;
Thrones, Temples, Marts, Art's alcoves, Learning's domes,
Patrician palaces, and _bourgeois_ homes.
Down, down!--to glut _its_ spleen, the paltry thing,
Impotent, save to lurk, and coil, and spring,
But powerful as the poison-drop, once sped,
That creeps, corrupts, and leaves its victim--dead!
As the asp's fang could turn to pulseless clay
The Pride of Egypt, so this Worm can slay
If left long covert for its crawling course.
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