Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Walter Murdoch (1874–1970). The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse. 1918.

By Bernard O’Dowd

80 . Young Democracy

HARK! Young Democracy from sleep

Our careless sentries raps:

A backwash from the Future’s deep

Our Evil’s foreland laps.

Unknown, these Titans of our Night

Their New Creation make:

Unseen, they toil and love and fight

That glamoured Man may wake.

Knights-errant of the human race,

The Quixotes of to-day,

For man as man they claim a place,

Prepare the tedious way.

They seek no dim-eyed mob’s applause,

Deem base the titled name,

And spurn, for glory of their Cause,

The tawdry nymphs of Fame.

No masks of ignorance or sin

Hide from them you or me:

We’re Man—no colour shames our skin,

No race or caste have we.

The prognathous Neanderthal,

To them, conceals the Bruce;

They see Dan Aesop in the thrall;

From swagmen Christ deduce.

Tho’ butt for lecher’s ribaldry

And scarred by woman’s scorn,

In baby-burdened girl they see

God-motherhood forlorn.

With them, to racial siredom glides

The savage we deprave;

That eunuch brilliant Narses hides:

A Spartacus, that slave.

They Jesus find in manger waif;

In horse-boys Shakespearehood:

And earthquake-Luthers nestling safe

In German miner’s brood.

The God that pulses everywhere

They know fills Satan’s veins;

No felon but they see Him there

Behind His mirror’s stains.

’Tis theirs Earth’s charnel rooms to clear,

And ruthless sweep away

The Lares and Penates dear

To man in his decay.

Their restless energy supplies

Munitions that will wreck

The keeps whence feudal enemies

Our free banditti check.

Their unrelenting wars they wage,

These Furies of the Right,

Where myriad Falsehood’s legions rage,

Artilleried by Might;

Where Fashion’s stupid iron clamps

Young Innovation’s head,

And Law the stalwart Present cramps

In Past’s Procrustes-bed;

Where Pride of learning, substance, blood,

Or prowess in the strife,

Exacts from teeming lowlihood

The lion’s share of life;

Where Gluttony would to the brutes

Degrade his loose-lipped gangs;

Where Tyranny his venom shoots

From one or million fangs;

Where Cruelty, in Wisdom’s mask,

Piths fame from writhing beasts;

Where blest is racial Murder’s task

By Christ’s apostate priests.

In Punic or in Persian fray

With Love’s and Conscience’ foes,

Unadvertising Romans they,

And Spartans free from pose.

Abused as mad or traitors by

The trolls they would eject;

Cold-shouldered by wan Apathy;

Of motives mean suspect;

Outcast from social gaieties;

Denied life’s lilied grace;

They mount their hidden Calvaries

To save the human race.

The bowers of Art a few may know;

A few wait highly placed:

Most bear the hods of common woe,

And some you call disgraced.

But whether in the mob or school,

In church or poverty,

They teach and live the Golden Rule

Of Young Democracy:—

‘That culture, joy and goodliness

Be th’ equal right of all:

That Greed no more shall those oppress

Who by the wayside fall:

‘That each shall share what all men sow:

That colour, caste’s a lie:

That man is God, however low—

Is man, however high.’