Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Edward Dyer
From Extracts from Sixe Idillia: The Prayer of Theocritus for Syracuse
Out of our island drive our enemies, our bitter fate,
Along the Sardine sea, that death of friends they may relate
Unto their children and their wives, and that the towns opprest
By enemies, of th’ old inhabitants may be possest:
That they may till the fields, and sheep upon the downs may bleat
By thousands infinite and fat, and that the herd of neat
As to their stalls they go may press the lingering traveller.
Let grounds be broken up for seed, what time the grasshopper
Watching the shepherds by their flocks, in boughs close singing lies,
And let the spiders spread their slender webs in armories,
So that of war the very name may not be heard again.
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