The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt/Power and Gentleness

by James Henry Leigh Hunt

POWER AND GENTLENESS.

I've thought, at gentle and ungentle hour,Of many an act and giant shape of power;Of the old kings with high exacting looks,Sceptred and globed; of eagles on their rocks,With straining feet, and that fierce mouth and drear,Answering the strain with downward drag austere;Of the rich-headed lion, whose huge frownAll his great nature, gathering, seems to crown;Of towers on hills, with foreheads out of sightIn clouds, or shown us by the thunder's light,Or ghastly prison, that eternallyHolds its blind visage out to the lone sea;And of all sunless, subterranean deepsThe creature makes, who listens while he sleeps,Avarice; and then of those old earthly cones,That stride, they say, over heroic bones;And those stone heaps Egyptian, whose small doorsLook like low dens under precipitous shores;$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$And him, great Memnon, that long sitting byIn seeming idleness, with stony eye,Sang at the morning's touch, like poetry;And then of all the fierce and bitter fruitOf the proud planting of a tyrannous foot,—Of bruised rights, and flourishing bad men,And virtue wasting heavenwards from a den; Brute force, and fury; and the devilish drouthOf the fool cannon's ever-gaping mouth;And the bride-widowing sword; and the harsh ⟨bray⟩The sneering trumpet sends across the fray;And all which lights the people-thinning starThat selfishness invokes,—the horsed war,Panting along with many a bloody mane.

I've thought of all this pride, and all this pain,And all the insolent plenitudes of power,And I declare, by this most quiet hour,$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$Which holds in different tasks by the fire-lightMe and my friends here, this delightful night,That Power itself has not one half the mightOf Gentleness. 'Tis want to all true wealth;The uneasy madman's force, to the wise health;Blind downward beating, to the eyes that see;Noise to persuasion, doubt to certainty;The consciousness of strength in enemies,Who must be strain'd upon, or else they rise;The battle to the moon, who all the while,High out of hearing, passes with her smile;The tempest, trampling in his scanty run,To the whole globe, that basks about the sun;Or as all shrieks and clangs, with which a sphere,Undone and fired, could rake the midnight ear,Compared with that vast dumbness nature keepsThroughout her starry deeps,Most old, and mild, and awful, and unbroken,Which tells a tale of peace beyond whate'er was spoken.