Every week of every season out of English ports go forth
White of sail or white of trail, East, or West, or South, or North,
Scattering like a flight of pigeons, half a hundred homesick ships,
Bearing half a thousand striplings — each with kisses on his lips
Of some silent mother, fearful lest she show herself too fond,
Giving him to bush or desert as one pays a sacred bond.
— Tell us, you who hide your heartbreak, Which is sadder, when all's done,
To repine, an English mother, or to roam, an English son?

You who shared your babe's first sorrow when his cheek no longer pressed
On the perfect, snow-and-roseleaf beauty of your mother-breast,
In the rigor of his nurture was your woman's mercy mute,
Knowing he was doomed to exile with the savage and the brute?
Did you school yourself to absence, all his adolescent years,
That, though you be torn with parting, he should never see the tears,
Now his ship has left the offing for the many-mouthed sea,
This your guerdon, empty heart, by empty bed to bend the knee!

And if he be but the latest thus to leave your dwindling board,
Is a sorrow less for being added to a sorrow's hoard?
Is the mother-pain the duller that to-day his brothers stand,
Facing ambuscades of Congo or alarms of Zululand?
Toil, where blizzards drift the snow like smoke across the plains of death?
Faint, where tropic fens at morning stream with fever-laden breath?
Die, that in some distant river's veins the English blood may run —
Mississippi, Yangtze, Ganges, Nile, Mackenzie, Amazon?
Ah! you still must wait and suffer in a solitude untold
While your sisters of the nations call you passive, call you cold —
Still must scan the news of sailings, breathless search the slow gazette,
Find the dreaded name ... and, later, get his blithe farewell! And yet —
Shall the lonely at the hearthstone shame the legions who have died
Grudging not the price their country pays for progress and for pride?
— Nay; but, England, do not ask us thus to emulate your scars
Until women's tears are reckoned in the budgets of your wars.