Antonín Sova

“ 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! ”

“ In the wake of the wind sobbed a burial requiem. . .
Here it floated into the city cess-pool. . . Windows
Hurled their sheds of light upon its surface
And magic of homesteads was trailing eerily
On the wrinkled waters
And trees dipped their sickly green, garlands loosened from cornices
Straggled down in the tarnished mirror of the waters.
Here mockeries of mortal being were revelling,
Here shrieked the song of unmolested espousals,
Writhing orgies of man the carnal
Of herds that are huddled and wedged together
By sharing the pangs of inherited sins. ”

“ Whereby we thrust our culture on a booth,
God's pity, is unended, still unended:
In it is lacking still thy final outcry
Of one, who in the treachery of darkness
Is grappling with his dreadful malady
And cravingly he snatches at achievement,
Snatches at moments in his soundless void,
Snatches at light in his dismantled brain,
And gropes for cadences, but on a sudden,
They slink away like sullen, sneering lackeys,
Pillage the palace, setting it aflame,
Abandon it and leave their master crazed
And in a fearful bankruptcy of mind
Stretched headlong in some room upon the floor. . . ”