Poems and Ballads (second series)/To Louis Kossuth

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

TO LOUIS KOSSUTH.

 

Light of our fathers' eyes, and in our own
Star of the unsetting sunset! for thy name,
That on the front of noon was as a flame
In the great year nigh thirty years agone
When all the heavens of Europe shook and shone
With stormy wind and lightning, keeps its fame
And bears its witness all day through the same;
Not for past days and great deeds past alone,
Kossuth, we praise thee as our Landor praised,
But that now too we know thy voice upraised,
Thy voice, the trumpet of the truth of God,
Thine hand, the thunder‑bearer's, raised to smite
As with heaven's lightning for a sword and rod
Men's heads abased before the Muscovite.