# Poems of Sentiment and Imagination/Vision of the Poor

VISION OF THE POOR.
"I had a dream that was not all a dream"— I saw the Poor, the sad and struggling Poor, Buffeting with the waves of Life's dark stream, And anon sinking to rise nevermore. I saw all forms of suffering that come From the unequal fortunes of the world; I saw the Book of Death all writ with doom, And saw the victims to their destinies hurled.
​Theirs is a woful fate; God help the Poor! Their hands are fettered, and their hearts are faint; Gaunt Famine and grim Death stand at their door, Yet Mercy hears not their weak lips' complaint. It is their lot to starve, their doom to die Unhelped, unwatched, unwept—let them not groan! No pitying ear is open to their cry; And mute, stern, prayerless, they die alone.
Want has no form of sorrow I saw not: From the meek wretch who uncomplaining dies, Leaving his tombless bones to mark the spot, To him whom want makes mad, and who defies Lawgivers and the law to bind his head To perish in the dust, but with a stroke Of his offending arm obtains his bread, And bursts his chain, and tramples on his yoke;
From the soft child, new-born, whose little wail, Ere it too perished, was the only grief The world vouchsafed to her who, faint and frail, Had agonized and died without relief, To the old man on whom the numbing snows Of winter and of age were falling cold, When one fierce night Death added up his woes, And all the old man's years and griefs were told;
From the strong, breaking heart of honest pride, To the mean, willing suppliant for bread, I saw Want's victims through my slumber glide, And heard the rustle of Death's wings outspread, 'Till gradually, as a cloud doth change, A change came o'er the creatures of my dream, And wild, fantastic shapes, grotesque and strange, Made the dark vapor of my vision teem.
They were all shades of those who died of want, By thousands risen from their nameless graves, ​Each phantom with the whimsey to recount How he on earth was one of Fortune's slaves. As in one grand kaleidoscope they passed, I saw all ranks of form and intellect, And noble men among the meanest classed, Compelled by sorrow to appear abject:
The scholar with his proud, pale, thoughtful brow, The poet with his bright but sunken eye; Artist and statesman—each told why and how Among the unhonored dead he came to lie. Strange were the tales these phantom beings told Of lives worn out in struggles against fate, Pining for that whose paltry price was gold— Yet Gold held destiny subordinate;
A proud, stern man, with face of manhood's prime, Whose hair was silvered in a single night, Had seen his treasures in one hour of time Taken forever from his doating sight— Wife, children, riches—and his heart gave way— That high, brave heart, that erst had been so strong, And had endured so much! It could not stay This last great agony, and broke ere long;
He had been poor in youth, and pace by pace Had toiled his way along the steep ascent, Till he had won of men an honored place, And love and wealth were with his laurels blent. Oft had his spirit fainted—still he turned His eye upon the goal he strove to gain, Till that for which his ardent soul so burned, And more was won, and yet it was in vain;
And one—a student with a pale, clear face, Through which the soul within shone like a light, And on whose brow yet lingered many a trace Of passionate struggle with the spoiler's might— ​Had faltered in the race, and sunk and died Unblest in his dim garret by a prayer; Not even a friend to stand his bed beside, And wipe his brow, or straighten his dank hair;
Frail, delicate girls, upon whose cheeks of snow The bright red hectic of consumption burned In strange delusive beauty, while the flow Of life grew fainter as each day returned; Each weary day of ceaseless toil and care, And strife for bread that was to eke out time; Oh! the black darkness of their sick despair Shook each pale ghost like memory of a crime!
And men whose lives were spent in night-black mines, Who hardly knew the earth was fair or bright, Who hardly saw the heaven that o'er it shines, Or bathed their haggard faces in its light; And those who searched the ocean's deep for gems, Or dragged the rivers for their bedded gold, To garnish thrones and brighten diadems, Yet wanted food, and covering from the cold;
And those who lived beneath the rich man's eye In fated Ireland, and yet were not deemed Worth the cold charity that let them die, Until with dead the common highways teemed; And England's million slaves who, toiling, weave Their very bones and nerves and heart-strings in The delicate fabrics that they, dying, leave As monuments alone that they have been;
And the poor wretches, basking in the sun Of fair Italia's despot-governed soil, Begging a pittance mean from every one, Or taking lawlessly the easiest spoil; ​And proud, brave Poland's broken-hearted sons, Whose lives were wasted on a foreign shore, In exile, bitterness, and want, that shuns To be confessed, since man the burden bore.
And there were those whose lives of crime and shame Began in want and ended in despair; Wild, fierce, half-demon creatures, whom to name Made the world shudder, crouching in their lair; Hunted and hated, dreaded and reviled, Outlawed and outcast from the face of earth, From friendship and from sympathy exiled, Dreading their death, and cursing more their birth.
From motley groups of women, many came Who told the story of their lives with tears; And many covered up their brows for shame, Shunning the mem'ry of false virtue's sneers. These clenched their hands as if the tale awoke In their imperfect minds a sense of wrong, Forcing their words as if they feared to choke With the emotions they dared not prolong.
Of all I saw these made my heart most sore, So irretrievable and dark their doom, So much existence gave them to deplore, And left for light and hope so little room. But the whole scene was sad enough, God knows! Though mixed with fancies foreign and grotesque; And deep enough and true enough its woes, Even relieved with something of burlesque.
All, all had suffered; every wretched heart Had throbbed with agony, and broke, or changed; Had borne for virtue's sake oppression's smart, And struggling died, or lived to be estranged, ​Sorrow and want and scorn had been the gifts Existence brought; a weary, galling weight, That Death had rid them of—kind Death, who lifts The poor man's burden when it is too late.
Alas! man's charity is oft like Death's: It comes when all is past that can be borne, And to our dying senses then bequeaths What might have saved our hearts, ere so much torn. None learn but those who suffer, what it is To bear with hope deferred, to watch and wait, And hang for days, weeks, months upon the abyss Of hopeless, ruinous, unrelenting fate.
My dream, thank Heaven! is past; but I have seen More than its counterpart with waking eyes; And many a mournful truth the heart may glean, That feels and thinks, which often haply lies Too deep for careless and unheeding sight; Yet undisguised, would harrow up a woe, And show that drops are shed from rocks we smite, More bitter than at Marah's fount did flow