Out in the acres underneath the sun,
The full-blown cotton, after months of rain,
Breaks from the boll and longs to kiss the ground.
Wearied with pain and blinded by the dust,
A child plods slowly down the long white rows,
A sack hung on his back, and in his eyes
The press and greed of ages and the world,
But evermore within his heart a hope,
And on his lips a trill and snatch of song.

What knows this child of how to give and take,
Of syntax or of places on the map?
What does he think of Isaac Newton's law;
What does he care for Shakspere and the light?
How can he measure in the after-years
The scale of justice or be held for sin?
Around him in God's glory and the light
A passionate bird hurls its defiant soul
Forth to the clouds in mocking of the blue;
But what is this to him whom in the years
A long, long wilderness of white awaits?
Around him sings the silence of the dawn,
Above him all the symphonies of heaven;
But what to him the glory or the gleam,
What means the music of the spheres to him?

Ye men who own the cotton-fields and plains,
Who run the whirring factories and the mills,
Weaving your wealth of heart-strings and of tears,
What is the heritage ye give this child?
What will ye say in that hereafter day,
When far beyond the working of the world,
Within the circuit of a righteous judge,
He greets you in the thunder-clouds of heaven?

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More packt with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?