Explore "An Anarchist" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
False to his art and to the high command / God laid upon him, Markham's rebel hand / Beats all in vain the harp he touched before: / It yields a jingle and it yields no more.
No more the strings beneath his finger-tips / Sing harmonies divine. No more his lips, / Touched with a living coal from sacred fires, / Lead the sweet chorus of the golden wires.
The voice is raucous and the phrases squeak; / They labor, they complain, they sweat, they reek! / The more the wayward, disobedient song / Errs from the right to celebrate the wrong, / More diligently still the singer strums, / To drown the horrid sound, with all his thumbs.
Gods, what a spectacle! The angels lean / Out of high Heaven to view the sorry scene, / And Israfel, "whose heart-strings are a lute," / Though now compassion makes their music mute, / Among the weeping company appears, / Pearls in his eyes and cotton in his ears.