Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet III

Oh he is worn with toil! the big drops run

Down his dark cheek; hold—hold thy merciless hand,

Pale tyrant! for beneath thy hard command

O'erwearied Nature sinks. The scorching Sun,

As pityless as proud Prosperity,

Darts on him his full beams; gasping he lies

Arraigning with his looks the patient skies,

While that inhuman trader lifts on high

The mangling scourge. Oh ye who at your ease

Sip the blood-sweeten'd beverage! thoughts like these

Haply ye scorn: I thank thee Gracious God!

That I do feel upon my cheek the glow

Of indignation, when beneath the rod

A sable brother writhes in silent woe.

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.

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Poems On The Slave Trade - Sonnet III

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