The Enslavement [poem by Marie E. J. Pitt]

[Editor: This poem by Marie E. J. Pitt was published in The Horses of the Hills and Other Verses (1911).]

The Enslavement.

Rail not at Mammon, helots of to-day,
Nor curse Bellona, goddess of the sword,
Nor Tyranny, of Toil meet overlord:
This is your covenant — “You must obey!”
Under its ban your helot-mothers lay;
Your sires, slave-born to slave-born mothers, poured
The gluttons’ wine, or cringed for bed and board:
Why murmur then? And whence your blank dismay?

Not with red rite of sword on Strife’s wan hill,
’Mid clash of arms and pomp of war’s estate,
Was Freedom slain, and her strong sons laid low,
But in some wild red dawning long ago,
When Man, the savage, took his savage mate,
And beat, and bent, and broke her to his will.

Source:
Marie E. J. Pitt, The Horses of the Hills and Other Verses, Melbourne: Specialty Press, 1911, page 50