Lady Jane Wilde Poems

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.
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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
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Has not vengeance been sated at last?
Will the holy and beautiful chimes
Ring out the old wrongs of the past,
Ring in the new glories and times?
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The guests have met in the castle hall.
Who rides through the castle gate,
With banner and plume? The young bridegroom
And a hundred knights in state.
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Full seven years have passed and flown
But years o’er Thekla lightly pass,
As rose leaves, falling one by one,
From roses on the summer grass.
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Full seven times the summer sun
Had waked the dreaming summer flowers,
And seven times they slept again
Beneath the winter snow and showers;
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Why comest thou here, so pale and clear,
Thou lone and shadowy child?
"I come from a clime of eternal sun,
Tho' my mother's home is a dreary one;
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What of the night, O Watcher on the Tower?
Is the Day dawning through the golden bars?
Comes it through the midnight, over clouds that lower,
Trailing robes of crimson mid the fading stars?
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Thou reck’nest seven Heavens; I but one:
And thou art it, Beloved! Voice and hand,
And eye and mouth, are but the angel band
Who minister around that highest throne
...