Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet I

Hold your mad hands! for ever on your plain

Must the gorged vulture clog his beak with blood?

For ever must your Nigers tainted flood

Roll to the ravenous shark his banquet slain?

Hold your mad hands! what daemon prompts to rear

The arm of Slaughter? on your savage shore

Can hell-sprung Glory claim the feast of gore,

With laurels water'd by the widow's tear

Wreathing his helmet crown? lift high the spear!

And like the desolating whirlwinds sweep,

Plunge ye yon bark of anguish in the deep;

For the pale fiend, cold-hearted Commerce there

Breathes his gold-gender'd pestilence afar,

And calls to share the prey his kindred Daemon War.

Robert Southey

Robert Southey, (born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland), English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the early Romantic movement. He was endlessly curious about human nature but would not face it, whether in others or himself, except in the less volatile form of human culture, most of which he ended up despising as immoral or irrational, seditious or superstitious, dirty or even diabolical. His own mind eventually failed, after a lifetime of repressed passion and herculean compensatory labor, and he died of a stroke on the vernal equinox of 1843. He was buried in Crosthwaite Churchyard in Keswick, alongside his first wife and three of his children.

More poems from same author

Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet III Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet II Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet I Botany Bay Eclogues 04 - John, Samuel & Richard Botany Bay Eclogues 03 - Humphrey And William

Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet I

More poems from same author

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