Greatness tends to slink In times of stress, And men grow cold Within the moment waited for. The hour of dawn is always less Than what it seemed to be before.
Children see Heroic fathers pale, And mothers sometimes leave Their babes to burn.
The mind is stern till blinded by its tears. The eyeless heart cannot endure its years.
Thomas McAfee's «Greatness Tends to Slink» is a bleak look at how people behave when the pressure is real. The opening lines say it straight out: greatness doesn't rise to a crisis, it shrinks from it. The long-awaited moment arrives, and men go cold. Even dawn, the classic image of hope, turns out to be smaller than we imagined while we waited for it.
The middle stanza gets personal and harsher. Children watch their heroic fathers go pale, and mothers abandon their babies to burn. These are the people we expect to be strongest, and the speaker insists on showing them failing. The poem doesn't say why, but it doesn't excuse them either.
The final couplet offers a grim explanation: the mind can stay stern only until grief or fear blinds it, and a heart that can no longer see cannot last. The mood is cold, disillusioned, and unsparing, with almost no comfort left.