I hear the bells now ringing,
Decrying the wrongs of man,
I hear the mournful singing,
Asking why the world is so.
The truth we do avoid,
But in seeking ye shall know.
We do not want to know
That Man's wrongs are his own.
Against dark tides, we rage
Against the dying of the light
Of something nobler
Than Man.
Would you ask a fox,
"Why are you so cruel?"
Is not man an animal, too?
Then do not ask him the same.
He hides his nature well,
Beneath a sly deceptive coat.
Do we not see that to man
Violence is delightful,
Self-absorption righteous?
Tears come to the eyes of good men
When they discover who man is,
For noone lives alone.
You are a man? Take then your inheritance!
Clasp to your chest your heart of darkness!
The slaughter of the natives
Is ours just as the Fourth of July,
Nazi Germany as much
As Periclean Athens.
Man has done it all.
Our souls writhe when a man is cruel.
"No man is an island."
We would never do that...
But neither would they
Who only followed orders.
These things lie dormant,
These things like deep within,
Buried in a case of self-deception,
Behind our self-denial.
At the root of who man is.
"You are that man."
Cry, man, when you discover who you are,
For it is said, learning who man is.
Cruelty does not occur accidentally in this world.
Feel compassion for yourself, man.
For the world's suffering
Weighs down on you as well.
Decrying the wrongs of man,
I hear the mournful singing,
Asking why the world is so.
The truth we do avoid,
But in seeking ye shall know.
We do not want to know
That Man's wrongs are his own.
Against dark tides, we rage
Against the dying of the light
Of something nobler
Than Man.
Would you ask a fox,
"Why are you so cruel?"
Is not man an animal, too?
Then do not ask him the same.
He hides his nature well,
Beneath a sly deceptive coat.
Do we not see that to man
Violence is delightful,
Self-absorption righteous?
Tears come to the eyes of good men
When they discover who man is,
For noone lives alone.
You are a man? Take then your inheritance!
Clasp to your chest your heart of darkness!
The slaughter of the natives
Is ours just as the Fourth of July,
Nazi Germany as much
As Periclean Athens.
Man has done it all.
Our souls writhe when a man is cruel.
"No man is an island."
We would never do that...
But neither would they
Who only followed orders.
These things lie dormant,
These things like deep within,
Buried in a case of self-deception,
Behind our self-denial.
At the root of who man is.
"You are that man."
Cry, man, when you discover who you are,
For it is said, learning who man is.
Cruelty does not occur accidentally in this world.
Feel compassion for yourself, man.
For the world's suffering
Weighs down on you as well.
2 comments:
This is really good stuff. Where is the last line of the first stanza from? "But in seeking ye shall know"
Thanks.
That's an alteration of Matthew 7:7 - "Seek and ye shall find," which I meant on one hand to be ironic (the Biblical meaning was that one seeks and finds God - this implies that seeking results in the knowledge of evil rather than a found 'answer.')
I'm usually reluctant to say anything about my own writing, but I'm not sure the references will make sense, and they really are quite essential.
"You are that man" comes from from 2 Samuel 11-12 in the Bible. King David had just sent the man Uriah into the front lines of battle to die so that he could marry Uriah's wife Bathsheba. In the story, God becomes outraged, and David's prophet Nathan tells David a story about how, one day, a rich man who had many flocks of sheep stole one sheep from a poor man, who loved his sheep as if it were his daughter, and had it served for dinner. David responds saying that the rich man should be killed. The story, of course, was an analogy, and Nathan tells David: "You are that man."
This passage is, of course, rather central to the meaning of the poem. The narrative story takes metaphysical significance - we are all men. When we recoil at stories of violence (and say that Nazi criminals should be killed), the response comes, "You are that man." In general, our response is to say that we would never act the way that they did, but they of course had likely believed the same.
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