Severn Teackle Wallis
Peace! Peace! God of our fathers, grant us Peace!
Unto our cry of anguish and despair
Give ear and pity! From the lonely homes,
Where widowed beggary and orphaned woe
Fill their poor urns with tears; from trampled plains,
Where the bright harvest Thou has sent us rots–
The blood of them who should have garnered it
Calling to Thee–from fields of carnage, where
The foul-beaked vultures, sated, flap their wings
O’er crowded corpses, that but yesterday
Bore hearts of brothers, beating high with love
And common hopes and pride, all blasted now–
Father of Mercies! not alone from these
Our prayer and wail are lifted. Not alone
Upon the battle’s seared and desolate track,
Nor with the sword and flame, is it, O God,
That Thou hast smitten us. Around our hearths,
And in the crowded streets and busy marts,
Where echo whispers not the far-off strife
That slays our loved ones; in the solemn halls
Of safe and quiet counsel–nay, beneath
The temple-roofs that we have reared to Thee,
And ‘mid their rising incense–God of Peace!
The curse of war is on us. Greed and hate
Hungering for gold and blood; Ambition, bred
Of passionate vanity and sordid lusts,
Mad with the base desire of tyrannous sway
Over men’s souls and thoughts, have set their price
On human hecatombs, and sell and buy
Their sons and brothers for the shambles. Priests,
With white, anointed, supplicating hands,
From Sabbath unto Sabbath clasped to Thee,
Burn, in their tingling pulses, to fling down
Thy censers and Thy cross, to clutch the throats
Of kinsmen, by whose cradles they were born,
Or grasp the brand of Herod, and go forth
Till Rachel hath no children left to slay.
The very name of Jesus, writ upon
Thy shrines beneath the spotless, outstretched wings,
Of Thine Almighty Dove, is wrapt and hid
With bloody battle-flags, and from the spires
That rise above them angry banners flout
The skies to which they point, amid the clang
Of rolling war-songs tuned to mock Thy praise.
All things once prized and honored are forgot:
The freedom that we worshipped next to Thee;
The manhood that was freedom’s spear and shield;
The proud, true heart; the brave, outspoken word,
Which might be stifled, but could never wear
The guise, whate’er the profit, of a lie;
All these are gone, and in their stead have come
The vices of the miser and the slave–
Scorning no shame that bringeth gold or power,
Knowing no love, or faith, or reverence,
Or sympathy, or tie, or aim, or hope,
Save as begun in self, and ending there.
With vipers like to these, oh! blessed God!
Scourge us no longer! Send us down, once more,
Some shining seraph in Thy glory glad,
To wake the midnight of our sorrowing
With tidings of good-will and peace to men;
And if the star, that through the darkness led
Earth’s wisdom then, guide not our folly now,
Oh, be the lightning Thine Evangelist,
With all its fiery, forked tongues, to speak
The unanswerable message of Thy will.
Peace! Peace! God of our fathers, grant us peace!
Peace in our hearts, and at Thine altars; Peace
On the red waters and their blighted shores;
Peace for the ‘leaguered cities, and the hosts
That watch and bleed around them and within,
Peace for the homeless and the fatherless;
Peace for the captive on his weary way,
And the mad crowds who jeer his helplessness;
For them that suffer, them that do the wrong
Sinning and sinned against.–O God! for all;
For a distracted, torn, and bleeding land–
Speed the glad tidings! Give us, give us Peace!
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem is a plea rather than a proclamation. Unlike rallying war songs that try to stiffen resolve, it speaks from exhaustion and moral collapse. The voice is communal, but not triumphant. It sounds like a people who have seen enough and can no longer pretend the cost is abstract or noble. The repeated cry for peace frames the poem as prayer, but the prayer is angry, accusatory, and desperate, not calm or resigned.
The opening section catalogs suffering in concrete terms. War is not presented as strategy or honor, but as absence: empty homes, widows, orphans, ruined fields, rotting harvests. The image of crops sent by God but left to decay because the men who should gather them are dead is especially sharp. It ties violence directly to waste and failure, not just death. The battlefield imagery is harsh and unsparing, with vultures and corpses replacing the language of glory. What matters here is not the enemy but the fact that those dead bodies once held “hearts of brothers.” The poem insists that war destroys shared humanity before it destroys armies.
As the poem widens its scope, it becomes more accusatory. War is no longer confined to battlefields. It infects cities, churches, councils, and marketplaces. The speaker makes a point of saying that even those far from the fighting are not innocent or untouched. This is where the poem becomes especially uncomfortable. It condemns greed, ambition, and the desire for power as the true engines of war. Leaders, profiteers, and ideologues are implicated alongside soldiers. The language here is deliberately harsh, framing these motives as a kind of moral disease.
One of the poem’s strongest and most controversial moves is its attack on religious complicity. Priests are shown abandoning mercy for violence, trading symbols of faith for weapons. Biblical references are turned against them, suggesting that scripture itself is being twisted into justification for slaughter. Even the name of Jesus is described as being hidden behind battle flags. This is not a rejection of faith, but an insistence that faith has been betrayed. God is addressed repeatedly, but human institutions claiming to act in God’s name are treated with deep suspicion.
The middle of the poem mourns not just lives lost, but values erased. Freedom, honesty, courage, and integrity are described as casualties alongside the dead. In their place come selfishness, corruption, and fear. The war has not only killed people; it has reshaped character. This moral erosion is presented as worse than physical destruction because it persists even away from the front lines. The poem suggests that a society willing to accept war for profit or power cannot remain free or truthful.
The final appeal for peace expands again, naming everyone affected: soldiers, prisoners, civilians, the mocking crowd, the guilty and the innocent alike. There is no clean division between victims and perpetrators. Everyone is caught in the same collapse. Peace is not framed as victory or settlement, but as rescue. The repetition at the end does not feel ceremonial; it feels urgent, almost panicked, as if the speaker fears time is running out.
As a war poem, this work stands firmly in the anti-war tradition. It does not argue policy or tactics. Instead, it exposes the moral cost of prolonged conflict and the ease with which ideals are sacrificed once violence becomes normalized. Its power comes from its refusal to comfort the reader. Peace is not presented as inevitable or even likely, only as desperately necessary.