Bars and Shadows

“Mourn not the dead,” Ralph Chaplin urges—instead, mourn those who see the world’s anguish and dare not speak. Then the bugle sounds, the iron door slams, and night settles over the cells.

Written in the 1920s from the hard world of prison, these poems turn confinement into a vantage point on freedom, injustice, and the human will. Chaplin’s speakers feel the cold bars, hear the guard’s keys, and watch a few sparrows gather at a snowbound window; beyond the walls, the sea, stars, and open road remain painfully near and impossibly far. An I.W.W. activist imprisoned for his anti-war convictions, Chaplin answers captivity not with silence but with longing, anger, and defiance. When the prison bugle calls another day to begin, what can still make a captive heart free?

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