Lady Jane Wilde Poems

The glory of Life is fleeting;
Its splendour passeth away,
As the tints and odours meeting
In the flowers we twined to‐day.
...

O Country, writhing in thy chain
With fierce, wild efforts to be free,
Not seeing that with every strain
The bonds close firmer over thee;
Or grasping blindly in thy hate
The temple pillars of the State,
To hurl them down on friend and foe,
Crushed in one common overthrow
...

When mighty passions, surging, heave the depth of life's great ocean
When the people sway, like forest trees, to and fro in wild commotion
When the world‐old kingdoms, rent and riven, quiver in their place,
As the human central fire is upheaving at their base,
...

Will our Leaders faint and falter
At the foes they have to bind
The Ignorance and Prejudice,
Bigot heart and shallow mind?
...

Close the starry dream‐portal,
We must tread earth again,
Flashes no light immortal
Now on life’s dreary plain.
We must wait, like the Stoic,
Brave, enduring, and strong,
Till the soul’s strength heroic
Bends the fetters of wrong.
...

Pale victims, where is your Fatherland?
Where oppression is law from age to age,
Where the death‐plague, and hunger, and misery rage,
And tyrants a godless warfare wage
...

Wherefore neighest thou so sadly?
Stampest with the hoof so madly?
Speak my steed—why at the tent
With thy stately neck down bent?
...

Fatherless and motherless, no brothers have I,
And all my little sisters in the cold grave lie;
Wasted with hunger I saw them falling dead
Lonely and bitter are the tears I shed.
...

Oh! might I pass as the evening ray
Melts in the deep’ning twilight away;
Calmly and gently thus would I die,
Untainted by ills of mortality.
Oh! might I pass as the silver star
That glitters in radiant light afar.
...

Dead! Dead! Ye are dead while ye live;
Ye've a name that ye live—but are dead.
Neither counsel nor love did ye give,
And your lips never uttered a word
...