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Title: Forward
Author: Alfred Noyes [
More Titles by Noyes]
_A thousand creeds and battle-cries,
A thousand warring social schemes,
A thousand new moralities,
And twenty thousand thousand dreams!_
_Each on his own anarchic way,
From the old order breaking free,--
Our ruined world desires_, you say,
_Licence, once more, not Liberty._
But ah, beneath the struggling foam,
When storm and change are on the deep,
How quietly the tides come home,
And how the depths of sea-shine sleep;
And we who march towards a goal,
Destroying only to fulfil
The law, the law of that great soul
Which moves beneath your alien will;
We, that like foemen meet the past
Because we bring the future, know
We only fight to achieve at last
A great re-union with our foe;
Re-union in the truths that stand
When all our wars are rolled away;
Re-union of the heart and hand
And of the prayers wherewith we pray;
Re-union in the common needs,
The common strivings of mankind;
Re-union of our warring creeds
In the one God that dwells behind.
Then--in that day--we shall not meet
Wrong with new wrong, but right with right;
Our faith shall make your faith complete
When our battalions re-unite.
Forward!--what use in idle words?--
Forward, O warriors of the soul!
There will be breaking up of swords
When that new morning makes us whole.
[The end]
Alfred Noyes's poem: Forward
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