We have drunk deep—
This generation—
We have drunk deep of evil …

The ironic spirit
Was our wet-nurse,
And we milked her in the soft latitudes of the equator of dreams …
In zones of comfort
We sipped the milk of peace;
Not without a bitter taste in the mouth,
The taste of trade and of toil,
But the sweet savour of sinlessness,
Of the excellence of human nature,
For when the gods died
The legion of devils withered,
And when the blaze of the seraphs was put out
Hell's darkness also vanished …

So we grew up
In the cotton of an all-human world,
Sheltered in the sane cubicle of intelligence:
There were no storms, but those of the winds and the clouds,
No passions among the polite,
No evils that were not error …

We were a good race, in spite of the quagmire of poverty,
And when at last that should be abolished
Then in goodness, the reign of kindliness should triumph …

We pitied the past
Lost as it was in the magic mists of superstition,
The demon Past drinking hot blood from a skull,
The Past of pestilence and battle,
The tragic ignorant Past …

We seemed free
Because we thought freely,
And because we could telegraph instead of travel,
And of all the generations of men
We were the least tragic …

It was as if the ironic spirit
Had made our content complete
To deepen the horror of what lay in wait for us …
The generation that seemed born to suffer least
Has suffered as no generation before it,
And we that were so good
Are black with evil beyond our ancestors …
Our kindliness has shaped a fiend's devastation of hate,
And our milk of humanity has turned to vapours of venom …
Out of our supersanity has come a universal madness,
And from our antiseptic safeties a devil's disregard for pain and death …
On the corpse of our Brotherhood of Man
We have erected a monument of slaughter,
And with the science that was to make us intelligent
We have taught cruelty new cunning …

The ironic spirit smiles with a bitter satisfaction
As it gives us to drink deep,
Deep of all evil.