Explore "Come Back Clean" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This is the song for a soldier / To sing as he rides from home / To the fields afar where the battles are / Or over the ocean's foam: / ‘Whatever the dangers waiting / In the lands I have not seen, / If I do not fall-if I come back at all, / Then I will come back clean.
‘I may lie in the mud of the trenches, / I may reek with blood and mire, / But I will control, by the God in my soul, / The might of my man's desire. / I will fight my foe in the open, / But my sword shall be sharp and keen / For the foe within who would lure me to sin, / And I will come back clean.