Meditações - tempo na Revolução Industrial

The Workhouse Clock

There’s a murmur in the air,
And noise in every street –
The murmur of many tongues,
The noise of numerous feet –
While round the workhouse door
The laboring classes flock,
For why? The Overseer of the Poor
Is setting the workhouse clock.

Who does not hear the tramp
Of thousands speeding along,
Of either sex and various stamp,
Sickly, crippled, or strong,
Walking, limping, creeping
From court, and alley, and lane,
But all in one direction sweeping,
Like rivers that seek the main?
Who does not see tem sally
From mill, and garret, and room,
In lane, and court, and alley,
From homes in poverty’s lowest valley
Furnished with shuttle and loom –
Poor slaves of Civilization’s galley –
And in for the day of doom?
Some, of hardly human form,
Stunted, crooked, and crippled by toil;
Dingy with smoke and dust and oil,
And smirched besides with vicious soil,
Clustering, mustering, all in a swarm.
Father, mother, and careful child,
Looking as if it had never smiled –
The sempstress, lean, and weary, and wan,
With only the ghosts of garments on –
The weaver, her sallow neighbor,
The grim and sooty artisan;
Every soul – child, women, or men,
Who lives – or dies – by labor.

Stirred by an overwhelming zeal,
And social impulse, a terrible throng!
Leaving shuttle, and needle, and wheel,
Furnace, and grindstone, spindle, and reel,
Thread, and yarn, and iron, and steel –
Yea, rest and the yet untasted meal –
Gushing, rushing, crushing along,
A very torrent of man!
Urged by the sights of sorrow and wrong,
Grown at last to a hurricane strong,
Stop in course who can!
Stop who can its onward course
And irresistible moral force;
O! vain and idle dream!
For surely as men are all akin,
Wether of fair or sable skin,
Acording to Nature’s scheme,
That human movement contains within
A blood-power stronger than steam.

Onward, onward, with hasty feet,
They swar – and westward still –
Masses born to drink and eat,´
But starving amidst Whitechapel’s meat,
And famishing down Cornhill”
Trough the poultry – but still unfed –
Christian Charity, hang your head!
Hungry – passing the street of Bread;
Thirsty – the street of Milk;
Ragged – beside the Ludgate Mart,
So gorgeous trhough mechanic art,
With cotton, and wool, and silk!

At last, before that door
That bears so many a knock
Ere ever it opens to sick or poor,
Like sheep they huddle and flock –
And would that all the good and wise
Could see the million of hollow eyes,
With a gleam derived from hope and skies,
Upturned to the workhouse clock!

Oh! That the parish powers,
Who regulate labor’s hours,
The daily amount of human trial,
Weariness, pain, and self-denial,
Would turn from the artificial dial
That striketh ten or eleven,
And go, for once, by that older one
That stands in the light of nature’s sun
And takes its time from Heaven!

in Punch (revista satírica semanal britânica), de 8 de Junho de 1844