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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
George Chapman: Men’s want of peace, which was from want of love
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George Chapman
From The Tears of Peace
So making peace with God, doth differ far
From clerics that go with God and man to war.
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Hate, War, and Massacre; uncrowned
Toil; And Sickness, t’ all the rest the base and
foil, Crept after; and his deadly weight, trod down
Wealth, Beauty, and the glory of a Crown.
***
Peace made us enter here secure of all;
Where, in a cave that through a rock did eat,
The monster Murther held his impious seat:
A heap of panting harts supported him,
On which he sat gnawing a reeking limb
Of some man newly murther’d.
As he ate, His grave-digg’d brows, like stormy eaves did sweat;
Which, like incensed fens, with mists did smoke;
His hide was rugged as an aged oak
With heathy leprosies; that still he fed
With hot, raw limbs, of men late murthered.
His face was like a meteor, flashing blood;
His head all bristled, like a thorny wood;
His neck cast wrinkles, like a sea enraged;
And in his vast arms was the world engaged
Bathing his hands in every cruel deed…
***
How her divine Oration did move
For th’ unredeemed loss of Human Love;
Object man’s future state to reason’s eye;
The soul’s infusion, immortality;
And prove her forms firm, that are here impress’d,
How her admired strains wrought on every breast;
And made the woods cast their immanity
Up to the air; that did to cities fly
In fuel for them; and, in clouds of smoke,
Ever hang over them; cannot be spoke;
Nor how to Human Love, to Earth now given,
A lightning stoop’d and ravish’d him to heaven,
And with him Peace with all her heavenly seed:
Whose outward Rapture made me inward bleed;
Nor can I therefore my intention keep,
Since Tears want words and words want tears to weep.
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