The Empire Builder
(On the death of a Catholic gentleman)
By John Jerome Rooney
I
This is the song of the Empire Builder,
Who out of the ends of the earth,
Thro’ travail of war and of carnage
Brings strange, new realms to birth.
This is the boast of the Empire Builder:
Give heed to the deeds of his hands
And scorn thou not the glory he hath
In his gold and his wasted lands.
He hath counted his neighbors’ cattle
With the cold, gray eye of greed:
He hath marked for his own the fields of wheat
Where he never had sown the seed:
The vine-clad cot by the hillside,
Where the farmer’s children play,—
“This shall fit in my plan,” he said;
“What use for such as they?”
And so, in the dusk of evening,
He brought his arméd men,
And where had shone the clustering grapes
There stretched a waste again.
Homeless, the children wandered
Thro’ the fields their father won:
No more shall they feel his clasp and kiss—
Aye, never beneath the sun.
Vex, vex not the Empire Builder,
Nor babble of Mercy’s shield;
Hath he not his vaster issue—
The linking of field to field?
Hath he not noted the boundary
That lies ’twixt “mine and thine”?
Hath he not said, “’Twere better for thee
If thine henceforth be mine”?
And so doth the Empire Builder,
From out of the ends of the earth,
Thro’ travail of war and of carnage
Bring strange, new realms to birth—
Realms builded on broken hearthstones,
The triumph of Rapine’s hour—
That one may boast in the halls of Fame
And sit in the seats of Power!
II
This is the song of the Empire Builder,
Who built not of wasted lands,
But who builded a kingdom of golden deeds
And of things not made by hands!
The fields of the spirit were his to roam,
The paths where the love-flowers grew:
He felt the breath of the spirits’ spring
In every wind that blew:
It came not laden with dying groans
And homeless orphans’ cries:
It blew from the mountains of the Lord
And the fields of Paradise.
This is the boast of the Empire Builder
Who built not of mouldering clay:
That the kingdom He built, not made by hands,
Shall never pass away!
The mind cannot measure its boundaries,
All Space is its outer gate:
It is broader than ever a man conceived
And more durable than Fate.
This is the Empire our brother built,
In His little hour of Earth,
Thro’ the spirit’s travail of righteous deeds
And the spirit’s glad rebirth.
He had silenced the boast of the Empire Builder,
With his gold and wasted lands,
By his deathless kingdom of golden deeds
And of things not made by hands.
This is the kingdom our brother built:
It is good: it hath sufficed;—
For who can measure the glory he keeps
With our Elder Brother, Christ?