I
GLOOM!
An October like November;
August a hundred thousand hours,
And all September,
A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days,
And half October like a thousand years . . .
And doom!
That then was Antwerp. . .
In the name of God,
How could they do it?
Those souls that usually dived
Into the dirty caverns of mines;
Who usually hived
In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;
Who dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud,
Lumbering to work over the greasy sods. . .
Those men there, with the appearance of clods
Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God
Ever shrived. . .
And it is not for us to make them an anthem.
You can read the rest of the poem on the Poetry Foundation website http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/248368
and see a digital copy of the poem on the California Digital Library website https://archive.org/details/antwerpford00fordrich