Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/291

 

What avail you now your lore and your revered gray hairs?
Your sorry wisdom has conceived not the light of righteousness,
Nor the gladness of youthful nations in their own destining;
Has conceived not that an ancient culture durst not enslave,
Would it warm and illumine,
And not be but a chafing and burdensome
Monstrous millstone about the neck of a galley-slave!
What avail you revered gray hairs, since you babble senile saws,
O dotard, tottering on the brink of the grave;
Since you have forgotten to proclaim unison and humaneness,
Destruction of tyrannies and of hatred;
Since you have forgotten to reconcile the world and its frail being,
And to utter a prayer for all-accomplishing compassion?
What avail you revered gray hairs, since you drudge for darkness,
In an age when a myriad slaves hunger with an all-human suffering
And clamour at the portals of retrieval!
Since through the causeways of ancient cities range spirits of anarchy
Scoffing at your Kaiserdom;