Arthur Stringer (1874–1950), a Canadian novelist and poet born in Chatham, Ontario, published “The Gift of Hate” in the early twentieth century, a period shadowed by world war and collapsing faith in love as humanity’s deepest truth. He spent much of his career crossing between journalism, fiction, and poetry, but this short lyric has the force of a private confession dragged into public light. Its speaker refuses the familiar claim that “love is the only thing that survives.” Instead, he insists that hate has an equally deep root in human history: it is not a passing mood but an inheritance.
At its core, the poem argues not that hate is good, but that it is honest. The speaker names his hatred plainly—for “hours and issues,” for “creeds and deeds and doubts,” for certain men “to the uttermost.” That parallel structure builds a litany of anger, as if hate cannot be contained in one line. Yet the title’s word “Gift” is bitterly ironic. Hate is not something the speaker chose; he was “spewed into life from a timeless tangle of sin,” born into centuries “strewn with hate.” The gift, then, is a burden passed down through history. The final lines make the paradox sharper: even as he hates, he turns that hate against “this King of Evil who has crowned my heart with Hate.” The speaker’s fury is not mindless violence; it is aimed at the very force that made him furious.
The shape of the verse works the same way. There is no regular rhyme or strict meter; the poem moves in free verse, with lines that stretch and contract like a speaker thinking aloud. Repetition creates the real rhythm. The word “hate” tolls through the poem, appearing at the end of several lines, and the anaphora of “There are…” turns the middle section into an incantation. The sparse rhyming of “weep” and “peace” offers a faint echo of the women’s grief, but it does not resolve into music. Even the capital letters do work: “Love” and “Hate” appear as large, almost mythical forces, and the final “Hate” with a capital H becomes a crown pressed onto the heart.
Imagery is equally stark. The speaker is “spewed into life,” a violent, bodily image that strips birth of tenderness and connects it to chaos. “Centuries strewn with hate” imagines history as a battlefield littered with wreckage rather than progress. Then, at the climax, the image shifts to a coronation: a “King of Evil” places a crown not on a ruler’s head but on a human heart. That regal language makes hate seem powerful, even majestic, but the power is destructive. Nearby, “Earth’s mothers and wistful women who cried for peace” stand in their graves, listening and weeping. The word “wistful” is especially cutting—their longing for peace is gentle and powerless beside the crowned force of hate.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to console. Many war-era poems try to salvage hope by asserting that love outlasts everything. Stringer instead admits that love and hate are twin capacities, and that denying hate can be a form of sentimentality. At the same time, the speaker does not celebrate his hate; he grieves it. The poem captures a distinctly modern disillusionment: the feeling that history has poisoned the heart, and that the only honest response is to name the poison and turn against its source. That complex moral energy keeps “The Gift of Hate” from becoming a simple rant. It is a poem about being wounded by history and still trying to aim that wound’s anger at the right enemy.