Cm.>-sii<:i.tJaUK*r 3>h.X.. DEDICATED TO RICHARD HENRY POWELL 2ND LIEUT., CINQUE PORTS BATTALION, ROYAL SUSSEX REGIMENT IN MEMORY. STRONG, LOYAL-SOULED, FULL-HEARTED, BLITHELY BRAVE, ONLY REMEMBERING LOVE KNOWS ALL HE GAVE : BEAUTIFUL BE THE STARS ABOVE HIS GRAVE. BY THE SAME WRITER ODES LONDON VISIONS THE WINNO WING-FAN THE ANVIL THE NEW WORLD CONTENTS PRELUDES PAGE EUROPE MDCCCCI 3 THE BELFRY OF BRUGES ... 8 THUNDER ON THE DOWNS . . 12 THE WINNOWING FAN THE FOURTH OF AUGUST . . .23 STRANGE FRUIT . . . .25 THE NEW IDOL . . . .27 THE HARVEST 28 TO THE BELGIANS . . . .29 LOUVAIN 32 TO GOETHE . . . . -34 AT RHEIMS 36 TO THE ENEMY COMPLAINING . . 39 TO WOMEN 40 FOR THE FALLEN . . . .42 ODE FOR SEPTEMBER . . -44 THE ANVIL THE ANVIL . . . . -53 THE HEALERS 54 THE ZEPPELIN 56 ORPHANS OF FLANDERS . . -58 THE ENGLISH GRAVES . . . 60 FETCHING THE WOUNDED . . 63 THE EBB OF WAR . . . .68 THE ANTAGONISTS . . . -7° EDITH CAVELL . . . -77 MID -ATLANTIC . . . . 8 1 THE CAUSE j . . . . -83 BEFORE THE DAWN before the dawn gallipoli the distant guns men of verdun . la patrie the deportation . the bells of ypres England's poet going west . the bereaved the sibyls . to the end . 87 88 92 94 97 100 104 106 107 109 112 120 THE NEW WORLD MORN LIKE A THOUSAND SHINING SPEARS ..... 123 THE NEW WORLD . . . . 1 24 THE SOWER ..... 128 STONEHENGE 12 9 GUNS AT THE FRONT . . -131 THE WITNESSES .... 133 I AM HERE, AND YOU . . . I36 DARK WIND 137 HUNGER 139 STRIKE STONE ON STEEL . . 141 SPRING HAS LEAPT INTO SUMMER . 142 THE ENGLISH YOUTH . . . 144 OXFORD IN WAR-TIME . . . I46 THE DEAD TO THE LIVING . . 149 KITCHENER 150 THE TEST 151 YPRES 152 INTO PEACE PAGE THE ARRAS ROAD .... 155 CAMBRAI . . . . . 158 AN INCIDENT AT CAMBRAI . . 159 THE UNRETURNING SPRING . . l6l A DEDICATION .... 162 AN ANTHEM OF THE FIVE NATIONS . 1 63 PEACE 165 PRELUDES B EUROPE MDCCCCI TO NAPOLEON Soars still thy spirit, Child of Fire ? Dost hear the camps of Europe hum ? On eagle wings dost hover nigher At the far rolling of the drum ? To see the harvest thou hast sown Smilest thou now, Napoleon ? Long had the world in blinded mirth Or suffering patience dreamed content, When lo ! like thunder over earth Thy challenge pealed, the skies were rent Thy terrible youth rose up alone Against the old world on its throne. With shuddering then the peoples gazed, And such a stupor bound them dumb As those fierce Colchian ranks amazed 4 EUROPE MDCCCCI Who saw the youthful Jason come, And challenging the War-God's name Step forth, his fiery yoke to tame. He took those dread bulls by the horn, Harnessed their fury to his will, And in the furrow swiftly torn The dragon's teeth abroad did spill : Behold, behind his trampling heel The furrow flowered into steel ! A spear, a plume, a warrior sprung — Arm'd gods in wrath by hundreds ; he Faced all, and full amidst them flung His magic helmet : instantly Their swords upon themselves they drew, And shouting each the other slew. But no Medean spell was thine, Napoleon, nor anointed charm ; Thy will was as a fate divine To wavering men who watched thine arm Drive on through Europe old thy plough. The harvest ripens even now ! EUROPE MDCCCCI 5 Time's purple flauntings, king and crown, Old custom's tall and idle weeds, Were tossed aside and trampled down, While thou didst scatter fiery seeds, That in the gendering lap of earth Prepared a new world's Titan birth. Then in thy path from underground, Where long benumbed in trance they froze, The Nations, giant forms unbound, Slow to their aching stature rose ; And through their wintry veins again Slow flushed the streams of life in pain. Thy thunder, O Napoleon, passed, But these whom thou hadst stirred to life, On them the imperious doom was cast Of inextinguishable strife. For peace they long, but blood and tears Still blinded the tempestuous years. A hundred years have flown, and still For peace they pine ; peace tarries yet. These groaning armies Europe fill, 6 EUROPE MDCCCCI And war's red planet hath not set. O mockery of peace, that gnaws Their hearts for so abhorred a cause ! Is peace so easy ? Nay, the names That are most dear and most divine To men, are like the heavenly flames That farthest from possession shine. Peace, love, truth, freedom, unto these The way is through the storming seas. Ye wakened Nations, now no more You battle for a monarch's whim ; The cause is now in your heart's core, Your soul must strive through every limb ; They who with all their soul contend Bear more, but to a nobler end. Be patient in your strife ! And thou, O England, dearer than the rest ; England, with proud looks on thy brow, England, with trouble at thy breast, Seek on in patient fortitude Strong peace, most worthy to be wooed. EUROPE MDCCCCI 7 Take up thy task, O nobly born ! With both hands grasp thy destiny. Easy is ignorance, easy scorn, And fluent pride, unworthy thee. Grand rolls the planet of thy fate : Be thy just passions also great ! Turn from the sweet lure of content, Rise up among the courts of ease ; Be all thy will as a bow bent, Thy sure oncoming like thy seas. Purge clear within thy deep desires To be our burning altar-fires ! Then welcome peril, so it bring Thy true soul leaping into light ; A glory for our mouths to sing And for our deeds to match in might, Till thou at last our hope enthrone And make indeed thy peace our own. January, 1901. THE BELFRY OF BRUGES Keen comes the dizzy air In one tumultuous breath. The tower to heaven lies bare ; Dumb stir the streets beneath. Immeasurable sky Domes upward from the dim Round land, the astonished eye Supposes the world's rim. And through the sea of space Winds drive the furious cloud Silent in endless race ; And the tower rocks aloud. Mine eye now wanders wide, My thought now quickens keen. O cities, far descried, What ravage have you seen THE BELFRY OF BRUGES 9 Of an enkindled world ? Homes blazing and hearths bare ; Of hosts tyrannic hurled On pale ranks of despair, Who fed with warm proud blood The cause unquenchable, For which your heroes stood, For which our Sidney fell ; Sidney, whose starry fame, Mirrored in noble song, Shines, all our sloth to shame, And arms us against wrong ; Bright star, that seems to burn Over yon English shore, Whither my feet return, And my thoughts run before ; Run with this rumour brought By the wild wind's alarms, Dark sounds with battle fraught, Menace of distant arms. «° THE BELFRY OF BRUGES 0 menace harsh, but vain ! For what can peril do But search our souls again To sift and find the true ? Prove if the sap of old Shoots yet from the old seed, If faith be still unsold, If truth be truth indeed ? Welcome the blast that shakes The wall wherein we have lain Slumbering, our heart awakes And rends the prison chain. Turn we from prosperous toys And the dull name of ease ; Rather than tarnished joys Face we the angry seas ! Or if old age infirm Be in our veins congealed, Bow we to Time, our term Fulfilled, and proudly yield. THE BELFRY OF BRUGES Not each to each we are made, Not each to each we fall, But every true part played Quickens the heart of all That feeds and moves and fires The many-peopled lands, And in our languor tires, But in our strength expands. For forward-gazing eyes Fate shall no terror keep. She in our own breast lies : Now let her wake from sleep ! 12 THUNDER ON THE DOWNS Wide earth, wide heaven, and in the summer air Silence ! The summit of the down is bare Between the climbing crests of wood ; but those Great sea-winds, wont, when the wet South-West blows, To rock tall beeches and strong oaks aloud And strew torn leaves upon the streaming cloud To-day are idle, slumbering far aloof. Under the solemn height and gorgeous roof Of cloud-built sky, all earth is indolent. Wandering hum of bees and thymy scent Of the short turf enrich pure loneliness : Scarcely an airy topmost-twining tress Of bryony quivers where the thorn it wreathes ; Hot fragrance from the honeysuckle breathes ; And sweet the rose floats on the arching briar's Green fountain, sprayed with delicate frail fires. For clumps of thicket, dark beneath the blaze Of the high westering sun, beset the ways THUNDER ON THE DOWNS '3 Of smooth grass, narrowing where the slope runs steep Down to green woods, and glowing shadows keep A freshness round the mossy roots, and cool The light that sleeps as in a chequered pool Of golden air. O woods, I love you well, I love the flowers you hide, your ferny smell ; But here is sweeter solitude, for here My heart breathes heavenly space ; the sky is near To thought, with heights that fathomlessly glow ; And the eye wanders the wide land below. And this is England ! June's undarkened green Gleams on far woods ; and in the vales between Grey hamlets, older than the trees that shade Their ripening meadows, are in quiet laid, Themselves a part of the warm, fruitful ground. The little hills of England rise around ; The little streams that wander from them shine And with their names remembered names en- twine Of old renown and honour, fields of blood High causes fought on, stubborn hardihood For freedom spent, and songs, our noblest pride, i4 THUNDER ON THE DOWNS That in the heart of England never died And, burning still, make splendour of our tongue. Glories enacted, spoken, suffered, sung ! You lie emblazoned on this land now sleeping ; And southward, over leagues of forest sweeping, White on the verge glistens the famous sea, That English wave, on which so haughtily Towered her sails, and one sail homeward bore Past capes of silently lamenting shore Victory's dearest dead. O shores of home, Since by the vanished watch-fire shields of Rome Dinted this upland turf, what hearts have ached To see you far away, what eyes have waked Ere dawn to watch those cliffs of long desire One after one rise in their voiceless choir Out of the twilight over the rough blue Like music ! . . . But now heavy gleams imbrue The inland air. Breathless the valleys hold Their colours in a veil of sultry gold With mingled shadows that have ceased to crawl ; For far in heaven is thunder ! Over all A single cloud in slow magnificence Climbs like a mountain, gradual and immense With awful head unstirring, and moved on THUNDER ON THE DOWNS '5 Against the zenith, towers above the sun. And still it thickens luminous fold on fold Of fatal colour, ominously scrolled And fleeced with fire ; above the sun it towers Like some vast thought quickening a world not ours Remote in the waste blue, as if behind Its rim were splendour that could smite us blind, So doom-piled and intense it crests heaven's height And mounting makes a menace of the light. A menace ! Yes, for when light comes, we fear. Light, that may touch, as the pure angel-spear, Us to ourselves, make visible, make start The apparition of the very heart And mystery of our thoughts, awaked from under The mask of cheating habit, and to thunder Bare in a moment of white fire what we Have feared and fled, our own reality. And if a lightning now were loosed in flame Out of the darkness of the cloud to claim Thy heart, O England, how wouldst thou be known In that hour ? How to the quick core be shown 16 THUNDER ON THE DOWNS And seen ? What cry should from thy very soul Answer the judgment of that thunder-roll ? I hear a voice arraign thee. " Where is now The exaltation that once lit thy brow ? Thou countest all thy ocean-sundered lands. Thou heapest up the labours of thy hands, Thou seest all thy ships upon the seas. But in thy own heart mean idolatries Usurp devotion, choke thee and annul Noble excess of spirit, and make dull Thine eyes, enfleshed with much dominion. Art thou so great and is the glory gone ? Do these bespeak thy freedom who deflower Time, and make barren every senseless hour, Who from themselves hurry, like men afraid Lest what they are be to themselves betrayed ? Or those who in their huddled thousands sweat To buy the sleep that helps them to forget ? — Life lies unused, life in its loveliness ! While the cry ravens still, ' Possess, Possess ! ' And there is no possession. All the lust Of gainful man is quieted in dust ; His faith, his fear, his joy, his doom he owns, No more ; the rest is parcelled with his bones, Save what the imagination of his heart THUNDER ON THE DOWNS '7 Can to the labour of his hands impart, Making stones serve his spirit's desire, and breathe. But thou, what dost thou to the world bequeath, Who gatherest riches in a waste of mind Unto what end, O confidently blind, Forgetful of the things that grow not old And alone live and are not bought or sold ! " Speaks that voice truth ? Is it for this that great And tender spirits suffered scorn and hate, Loved to the utmost, poured themselves, gave all Nor counted lost, spirits imperial ? Where are they now, they that our memory guard Among the nations ? Shall I say, enstarred And throned aloof ? No, not from heavens of thought Watching our muddied brief procession, not Judges sublime above us, without share In our thronged ways of struggle, hope, despair, But in our blood, our dreams, our deeds they stir, Strive on our lips for language, shame and spur The sluggard in us, out of darkness come Like summoned champions when the world is dumb ; c is THUNDER ON THE DOWNS Within our hearts they wait with all they gave. Woe to us, woe, if we become their grave ! It shall not be. Darken thy pall, and trail, Thunder of heaven, above the valleys pale ! Another England in my vision glows. And she is armed within ; at last she knows Herself, and what to her own soul belongs. Mid the world's irremediable wrongs She keeps her faith ; and nothing of her name Or of her handiwork but doth proclaim Her purpose. Her own soul hath made her free, Not circumstance ; she knows no victory Save of the mind : in her is nothing done, No wrong, no shame, no glory of any one, But is the cause of all and each, a thing Felt like a fire to kindle and to sting The proud blood of a nation. On her brows Is hope ; her body doth her spirit house Express and eloquent, not numb and frore; And her voice echoes over sea and shore, And all the lands and isles that are her own In choric interchange and antiphon Answer, as fancy hears in yonder cloud From vale to vale repeated low and loud The still suspended thunder. THUNDER ON THE DOWNS 19 Hearts of Youth, High-beating, ardent, quick in hope and ruth And noble anger, O wherever now You dedicate your uncorrupted vow To be an energy of Light, a sword Of the ever-living Will, amid abhorred Din of the reeking street and populous den Where under the great stars blind lusts of men War on each other, or escaped to hills Where peace the solitary evening fills, Or far remote on other soils of earth Keeping the dearness of your fathers' hearth On vast plains of the West, or Austral strands Of the warm underworld, or storied lands Of the orient sun, or over ocean ways Stemming the wave through blue or stormy days Wherever, as the circling light slopes round, On human lips is heard an English sound, O scattered, silent, hidden and unknown, Be lifted up, for you are not alone ! High-beating hearts, to your deep vows be true ! Live out your dreams, for England lives in you. Midsummer, 1911. THE WINNOWING FAN THE FOURTH OF AUGUST Now in thy splendour go before us, Spirit of England, ardent-eyed, Enkindle this dear earth that bore us, In the hour of peril purified. The cares we hugged drop out of vision, Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate. We step from days of sour division Into the grandeur of our fate. For us the glorious dead have striven, They battled that we might be free. We to their living cause are given ; We arm for men that are to be. Among the nations nobliest chartered, England recalls her heritage. In her is that which is not bartered, Which force can neither quell nor cage. 23 24 THE FOURTH OF AUGUST For her immortal stars are burning ; With her the hope that's never done, The seed that's in the Spring's returning, The very flower that seeks the sun. She fights the fraud that feeds desire on Lies, in a lust to enslave or kill, The barren creed of blood and iron, Vampire of Europe's wasted will . . . Endure, O Earth ! and thou, awaken, Purged by this dreadful winnowing-fan, O wronged, untameable, unshaken Soul of divinely suffering man. 2 S STRANGE FRUIT This year the grain is heavy-ripe ; The apple shows a ruddier stripe ; Never berries so profuse Blackened with so sweet a juice On brambly hedges, summer-dyed. The yellow leaves begin to glide ; But Earth in careless lap-ful treasures Pledge of over-brimming measures, As if some rich unwonted zest Stirred prodigal within her breast. And now, while plenty's left uncared, The fruit unplucked, the sickle spared, Where men go forth to waste and spill, Toiling to burn, destroy, and kill, Lo, also side by side with these Beast-hungers, ravening miseries, The heart of man has brought to birth Splendours richer than his earth. Now in the thunder-hour of fate Each one is kinder to his mate ; The surly smile ; the hard forbear ; There's help and hope for all to share ; STRANGE FRUIT And sudden visions of goodwill Transcending all the scope of ill Like a glory of rare weather Link us in common light together, A clearness of the cleansing sun, Where none's alone and all are one And touching each a priceless pain We find our own true hearts again. No more the easy masks deceive : We give, we dare, and we believe. 2 7 THE NEW IDOL Magnificent the Beast ! Look in the eyes Of the fell tiger towering on his prey, Beautiful in his power to pounce and slay And effortless in action. He denies All but himself. He gloats on his weak prize, Roaring the anger of wild breath at bay, Blank anger like an element whose way Is mere annihilation ! Terrible eyes ! But there is one more to be feared, who can Escape the prison of his own wrath ; whose will Lives beyond life ; who smiles with quiet lips ; Most terrible because most tender, Man, — Not only uncowed but irresistible When the cause fires him to the finger-tips. 28 THE HARVEST Red reapers under these sad August skies, Proud War- Lords, careless of ten thousand dead, Who leave earth's kindly crops unharvested As you have left the kindness of the wise For brutal menace and for clumsy lies, The spawn of insolence by bragging fed, With power and fraud in faith's and honour's stead, Accounting these but good stupidities ; You reap a heavier harvest than you know. Disnaturing a nation, you have thieved Her name, her patient genius, while you thought To fool the world and master it. You sought Reality. It comes in hate and woe. In the end you also shall not be deceived. TO THE BELGIANS O race that Caesar knew, That won stern Roman praise, What land not envies you The laurel of these days ? You built your cities rich Around each towered hall, — Without, the statued niche, Within, the pictured wall. Your ship-thronged wharves, your marts With gorgeous Venice vied. Peace and her famous arts Were yours : though tide on tide Of Europe's battle scourged Black field and reddened soil, From blood and smoke emerged Peace and her fruitful toil. 3o TO THE BELGIANS Yet when the challenge rang, " The War-Lord comes ; give room ! " Fearless to arms you sprang Against the odds of doom. Like your own Damian Who sought that lepers' isle To die a simple man For men with tranquil smile, So strong in faith you dared Defy the giant, scorn Ignobly to be spared, Though trampled, spoiled, and torn, And in your faith arose And smote, and smote again, Till those astonished foes Reeled from their mounds of slain ; The faith that the free soul, Untaught by force to quail, Through fire and dirge and dole Prevails and shall prevail. TO THE BELGIANS 3 Still for your frontier stands The host that knew no dread, Your little, stubborn land's Nameless, immortal dead. 32 LOUVAIN To Dom Bruno Destrte, O.S.B. I It was the very heart of Peace that thrilled In the deep minster-bell's wide-throbbing sound When over old roofs evening seemed to build Security this world has never found. Your cloister looked from Caesar's rampart, high O'er the fair city : clustered orchard-trees Married their murmur with the dreaming sky. It was the house of lore and living peace. And there we talked of youth's delightful years In Italy, in England. Now, O Friend, I know not if I speak to living ears Or if upon you too is come the end. Peace is on Louvain ; dead peace of spilt blood Upon the mounded ashes where she stood. LOUVAIN 33 II But from that blood, those ashes, there arose Not hoped-for terror cowering as it ran, But divine anger flaming upon those Defamers of the very name of man, Abortions of their blind hyena-creed, Who for " protection " of their battle-host Against the unarmed of them they had made to bleed, Whose hearts they had tortured to the utter- most Without a cause, past pardon, fired and tore The towers of fame and beauty, while they shot And butchered the defenceless in the door. But History shall hang them high, to rot Unburied, in the face of times unborn, Mankind's abomination and last scorn. D TO GOETHE Goethe, who saw and who foretold A world revealed New-springing from its ashes old On Valmy field, When Prussia's sullen hosts retired Before the advance Of ragged, starved, but freedom-fired Soldiers of France ; If still those clear, Olympian eyes Through smoke and rage Your ancient Europe scrutinize, What think you, Sage ? Are these the armies of the Light That seek to drown The light of lands where freedom's fight Has won renown ? TO GOETHE 35 Will they blot also out your name Because you praise All works of men that shrine the flame Of beauty's ways, Wherever men have proved them great, Nor, drunk with pride, Saw but a single swollen State And naught beside, Nor dreamed of drilling Europe's mind With threat and blow The way professors have designed Genius should go ? Or shall a people rise at length And see, and shake The fetters from its giant strength. And grandly break This pedantry of feud and force To man untrue Thundering and blundering on its course To death and rue ? AT RHEIMS Their hearts were burning in their breasts Too hot for curse or cries. They stared upon the towers that burned Before their smarting eyes. There where, since France began to be, Anointed kings knelt down, There where the Maid, the unafraid, Received her vision's crown, The senseless shell with nightmare scream Burst, and fair fragments fell Torn from their centuries of peace As by the rage of hell. What help for wrath, what use for wail ? Before a dumb despair All ancient, high, heroic France Seemed burning, bleeding there. AT RHEIMS 37 Within, the pillars soar to gloom Lit by the glimmering Rose ; Spirits of beauty shrined in stone Afar from mortal woes, Hearing not, though their haunted shade Is stricken, and all around With splintering flash and brutal crash The ghostly aisles resound. And there, upon the pavement stretched, The German wounded groan To see the dropping flames of death And feel the shells their own. Too fierce the fire ! Helped by their foes They stagger out to air. The green-gray coats are seen, are known Through all the crowded square. Ah, now for vengeance ! Deep the groan : A death-knell ! Quietly Soldiers unsling their rifles, lift And aim with steady eye. 58 AT RHEIMS But sudden in the hush between Death and the doomed, there stands Against those levelled guns a priest, Gentle, with outstretched hands. Be not as guilty as they ! he cries . . . Each lets his weapon fall, As if a vision showed him France And vengeance vain and small. 30 TO THE ENEMY COMPLAINING Be ruthless, then ; scorn slaves of scruple ; avow The blow, planned with such patience, that you deal So terribly ; hack on, and care not how The innocent fall ; live out your faith of steel. Then you speak speech that we can comprehend. It cries from the unpitied blood you spill. And so we stand against you, and to the end Flame as one man, the weapon of one will. But when your lips usurp the loyal phrase Of honour, querulously voluble Of " chivalry " and " kindness," and you praise What you despise for weakness of the fool, Then the gorge rises. Bleat to dupe the dead ! The wolf beneath the sheepskin drips too red. 40 TO WOMEN Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts That have foreknown the utter price. Your hearts burn upward like a flame Of splendour and of sacrifice. For you, you too, to battle go, Not with the marching drums and cheers But in the watch of solitude And through the boundless night of fears. Swift, swifter than those hawks of war, Those threatening wings that pulse the air, Far as the vanward ranks are set, You are gone before them, you are there 1 And not a shot comes blind with death And not a stab of steel is pressed Home, but invisibly it tore And entered first a woman's breast. TO WOMEN 4 « Amid the thunder of the guns, The lightnings of the lance and sword, Your hope, your dread, your throbbing pride, Your infinite passion is outpoured From hearts that are as one high heart Withholding naught from doom and bale, Burningly offered up, — to bleed, To bear, to break, but not to fail 1 42 FOR THE FALLEN With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, Fallen in the cause of the free. Solemn the drums thrill : Death august and royal Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres. There is music in the midst of desolation And a glory that shines upon our tears. They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted, They fell with their faces to the foe. FOR THE FALLEN They shall grow not old, as we th> t are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years con- demn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. They mingle not with their laughing comrades again ; They sit no more at familiar tables of home ; They have no lot in our labour of the day-time ; They sleep beyond England's foam. But where our desires are and our hopes pro- found, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night ; As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain, As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain. 44 ODE FOR SEPTEMBER i On that long day when England held her breath,. Suddenly gripped at heart And called to choose her part Between her loyal soul and luring sophistries, We watched the wide, green-bosomed land beneath Driven and tumultuous skies ; We watched the volley of white shower after shower Desolate with fierce drops the fallen flower ; And still the rain's retreat Drew glory on its track, And still, when all was darkness and defeat, Upon dissolving cloud the bow of peace shone back. So in our hearts was alternating beat, With very dread elate ; And Earth dyed all her day in colours of our fate. ODE FOR SEPTEMBER 45 11 But oh, how faint the image we foretold In fancies of our fear Now that the truth is here ! And we awake from dream yet think it still a dream. It bursts our thoughts with more than thought can hold ; And more than human seem These agonies of conflict ; Elements At war ! yet not with vast indifference Casually crushing ; nay, It is as if were hurled Lightnings that murdered, seeking out their prey; As if an earthquake shook to chaos half the world, Equal in purpose as in power to slay ; And thunder stunned our ears Streaming in rain of blood on torrents that are tears. 4<5 ODE FOR SEPTEMBER in Around a planet rolls the drum's alarm. Far where the summer smiles Upon the utmost isles, Danger is treading silent as a fever-breath. Now in the North the secret waters arm ; Under the wave is Death : They fight in the very air, the virgin air, Hovering on fierce wings to the onset : there Nations to battle stream ; Earth smokes and cities burn ; Heaven thickens in a storm of shells that scream; The long lines shattering break, turn and again return ; And still across a continent they teem, Moving in myriads ; more Than ranks of flesh and blood, but soul with soul at war ! ODE FOR SEPTEMBER 47 IV All the hells are awake : the old serpents hiss From dungeons of the mind ; Fury of hate born blind, Madness and lust, despairs and treacheries un- clean ; They shudder up from man's most dark abyss. But there are heavens serene That answer strength with strength ; they stand secure ; They arm us from within, and we endure. Now are the brave more brave, Now is the cause more dear, The more the tempests of the darkness rave, As, when the sun goes down, the shining stars are clear. Radiant the spirit rushes to the grave. Glorious it is to live In such an hour, but life is lovelier yet to give* 4 3 ODE FOR SEPTEMBER v Alas ! what comfort for the uncomforted, Who knew no cause, nor sought Glory or gain ? they are taught, Homeless in homes that burn, what human hearts can bear. The children stumble over their dear dead, Wandering they know not where. And there is one who simply fights, obeys, Tramps, till he loses count of nights and daj^s, Tired, mired in dust and sweat, Far from his own hearth-stone ; A common man of common earth, and yet The battle-winner he, a man of no renown, Where " food for cannon " pays a nation's debt. This is Earth's hero, whom The pride of Empire tosses careless to his doom. ODE FOR SEPTEMBER 49 VI Now will we speak, while we have eyes for tears And fibres to be wrung And in our mouths a tongue. We will bear wrongs untold but will not only bear ; Not only bear, but build through striving years The answer of our prayer, That whatsoever has the noble name Of man, shall not be yoked to alien shame ; That life shall be indeed Life, not permitted breath Of spirits wrenched and forced to others' need, Robbed of their nature's joy and free alone in death. The world shall travail in that cause, shall bleed, But deep in hope it dwells Until the morning break which the long night foretells. E 50 ODE FOR SEPTEMBER VII 0 children filled with your own airy glee Or with a grief that comes So swift, so strange, it numbs, If on your growing youth this page of terror bite, Harden not then your senses, feel and be The promise of the light. O heirs of Man, keep in your hearts not less The divine torrents of his tenderness ! 'Tis ever war : but rust Grows on the sword ; the tale Of earth is strewn with empires heaped in dust Because they dreamed that force should punish and prevail. The will to kindness lives beyond their lust ; Their grandeurs are undone : Deep, deep within man's soul are all his vic- tories won. THE ANVIL THE ANVIL Burned from the ore's rejected dross The iron whitens in the heat. With plangent strokes of pain and loss The hammers on the iron beat. Searched by the fire, through death and dole We feel the iron in our soul. O dreadful Forge ! if torn and bruised The heart, more urgent comes our cry Not to be spared but to be used, Brain, sinew, and spirit, before we die. Beat out the iron, edge it keen, And shape us to the end we mean ! 53 54 THE HEALERS In a vision of the night I saw them, In the battles of the night. 'Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood They were moving like light, Light of the reason, guarded Tense within the will, As a lantern under a tossing of ^boughs Burns steady and still. With scrutiny calm, and with fingers Patient as swift They bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen Bodies uplift, Untired and defenceless ; around them With shrieks in its breath Bursts stark from the terrible horizon Impersonal death ; THE HEALERS 55 But they take not their courage from anger That blinds the hot being ; They take not their pity from weakness ; Tender, yet seeing ; Feeling, yet nerved to the uttermost ; Keen, like steel ; Yet the wounds of the mind they are stricken with, Who shall heal ? They endure to have eyes of the watcher In hell, and not swerve For an hour from the faith that they follow, The light that they serve. Man true to man, to his kindness That overflows all, To his spirit erect in the thunder When all his forts fall, — This light, in the tiger-mad welter They serve and they save. What song shall be worthy to sing of them— Braver than the brave ? THE ZEPPELIN Guns ! far and near, Quick, sudden, angry, They startle the still street. Upturned faces appear, Doors open on darkness, There is a hurrying of feet, And whirled athwart gloom White fingers of alarm Point at last there Where illumined and dumb A shape suspended Hovers, a demon of the starry Strange and cold as a dream Of sinister fancy, It charms like a snake, Poised deadly in a gleam, While bright explosions Leap up to it and break. THE ZEPPELIN 57 Is it terror you seek To exult in ? Know then Hearts are here That the plunging beak Of night-winged murder Strikes not with fear So much as it strings To a deep elation And a quivering pride That at last the hour brings For them too the danger Of those who died, Of those who yet fight Spending for each of us Their glorious blood In the foreign night, — That now we are neared to them Thank we God. 5« ORPHANS OF FLANDERS Where is the land that fathered, nourished, poured The sap of a strong race into your veins, Land of wide tilth, of farms and granaries stored, Of old towers chiming over peaceful plains ? It is become a vision, barred away Like light in cloud, a memory and belief. On those lost plains the Glory of yesterday Builds her dark towers for the bells of Grief. It is become a splendour-circled name For all the world ; a torch against the skies Burns on that blood-spot, the unpardoned shame Of them that conquered : but your homeless eyes See rather some brown pond by a white wall, Red cattle crowding in the rutty lane, A garden, where the hollyhocks were tall In the Augusts that shall never be again. ORPHANS OF FLANDERS 59 There your thoughts cling as the long-thrusting root Clings in the ground ; your orphaned hearts are there. O mates of sunburnt earth, your love is mute But strong like thirst and deeper than despair. You have endured what pity can but grope To feel : into that darkness enters none. We have but hands to help ; yours is the hope Whose courage rises silent with the sun. 6o THE ENGLISH GRAVES The rains of yesterday are flown, And light is on the farthest hills ; The homeliest rough grass by the stone To radiance thrills ; And the wet bank above the ditch, Trailing its thorny bramble, shows Soft apparitions, clustered rich, Of the pure primrose. The shining stillness breathes, vibrates From simple earth to lonely sky, A hinted wonder that awaits The heart's reply. O lovely life ! the chaffinch sings High on the hazel, near and clear. Sharp to the heart's blood, sweetness springs In the morning here. THE ENGLISH GRAVES 61 But my heart goes with the young cloud That voyages the April light Southward, across the beaches loud And cliffs of white To fields of France, far fields that spread Beyond the tumbling of the waves, And touches as with shadowy tread The English graves. There too is Earth that never weeps, The unrepining Earth, that holds The secret of a thousand sleeps And there unfolds Flowers of sweet ignorance on the slope Where strong arms dropped and blood choked breath, Earth that forgets all things but hope And smiles on death. They poured their spirits out in pride, They throbbed away the price of years : Now that dear ground is glorified With dreams, with tears. THE ENGLISH GRAVES A flower there is sown, to bud And bloom beyond our loss and smart Noble France, at its root is blood From England's heart. 63 FETCHING THE WOUNDED At the road's end glimmer the station lights ; How small beneath the immense hollow of Night's Lonely and living silence ! Air that raced And tingled on the eyelids as we faced The long road stretched between the poplars flying To the dark behind us, shuddering and sighing With phantom foliage, lapses into hush. Magical supersession ! The loud rush Swims into quiet ; midnight reassumes Its solitude ; there's nothing but great glooms, Blurred stars ; whispering gusts ; the hum of wires. And swerving leftwards upon noiseless tires We glide over the grass that smells of dew. A wave of wonder bathes my body through ! For there in the headlamps' gloom-surrounded beam Tall flowers spring before us, like a dream, Each luminous little green leaf intimate 64 FETCHING THE WOUNDED And motionless, distinct and delicate With powdery white bloom fresh upon the stem, As if that clear beam had created them Out of the darkness. Never so intense I felt the pang of beauty's innocence, Earthly and yet unearthly. A sudden call ! We leap to ground, and I forget it all. Each hurries on his errand ; lanterns swing ; Dark shapes cross and re-cross the rails ; we bring Stretchers, and pile and number them ; and heap The blankets ready. Then we wait and keep A listening ear. Nothing comes yet ; all's still. Only soft gusts upon the wires blow shrill Fitfully, with a gentle spot of rain. Then, ere one knows it, the long gradual train Creeps quietly in and slowly stops. No sound But a few voices' interchange. Around Is the immense night-stillness, the expanse Of faint stars over all the wounds of France. Now stale odour of blood mingles with keen Pure smell of grass and dew. Now lantern sheen Falls on brown faces opening patient eyes FETCHING THE WOUNDED 6 S And lips of gentle answers, where each lies Supine upon his stretcher, black of beard Or with young cheeks ; on cap and tunic smeared And stained, white bandages round foot or head Or arm, discoloured here and there with red. Sons of all corners of wide France ; from Lille, Douay, the land beneath the invader's heel, Champagne, Touraine, the fisher-villages Of Brittany, the valleyed Pyrenees, Blue coasts of the South, old Paris streets. Argonne Of ever smouldering battle, that anon Leaps furious, brothered them in arms. They fell In the trenched forest scarred with reeking shell. Now strange the sound comes round them in the night Of English voices. By the wavering light Quickly we have borne them, one by one, to the air, And sweating in the dark lift up with care, Tense-sinewed, each to his place. The cars at last Complete their burden : slowly, and then fast We glide away. F 66 FETCHING THE WOUNDED And the dim round of sky, Infinite and silent, broods unseeingly Over the shadowy uplands rolling black Into far woods, and the long road we track Bordered with apparitions, as we pass, Of trembling poplars and lamp-whitened grass, A brief procession flitting like a thought Through a brain drowsing into slumber ; nought But we awake in the solitude immense ! But hurting the vague dumbness of my sense Are fancies wandering the night : there steals Into my heart, like something that one feels In darkness, the still presence of far homes Lost in deep country, and in little rooms The vacant bed. I touch the world of pain That is so silent. Then I see again Only those infinitely patient faces In the lantern beam, beneath the night's vast spaces, Amid the shadows and the scented dew ; And those illumined flowers, springing anew In freshness like a smile of secrecy From the gloom-buried earth, return to mc. The village sleeps ; blank walls, and windows barred. But lights are moving in the hushed courtyard FETCHING THE WOUNDED 67 As we glide up to the open door. The Chief Gives every man his order, prompt and brief. We carry up our wounded, one by one. The first cock crows : the morrow is begun. 68 THE EBB OF WAR In the seven-times taken and retaken town Peace ! The mind stops ; sense argues against sense. The August sun is ghostly in the street As if the Silence of a thousand years Were its familiar. All is as it was At the instant of the shattering : flat-thrown walls ; Dislocated rafters ; lintels blown awry And toppling over ; what were windows, mere Gapings on mounds of dust and shapelessness ; Charred posts caught in a bramble of twisted iron ; Wires sagging tangled across the street ; the black Skeleton of a vine, wrenched from the old house It clung to ; a limp bell-pull ; here and there Little printed papers pasted on the wall. It is like a madness crumpled up in stone, Laughterless, tearless, meaningless ; a frenzy Stilled, like at ebb the shingle in sea-caves Where the imagined weight of water swung THE EBB OF WAR 6 9 Its senseless crash with pebbles in myriads churned By the random seethe. But here was flesh and blood, Seeing eyes, feeling nerves ; memoried minds With the habit of the picture of these fields And the white roads crossing the wide green plain. All vanished ! One could fancy the very fields Were memory's projection, phantoms ! All Silent ! The stone is hot to the touching hand. Footsteps come strange to the sense. In the sloped churchyard, Where the tower shows the blue through its great rents, Shadow falls over pitiful wrecked graves, And on the gravel a bare-headed boy, Hands in his pockets, with brown absent eyes, Whistles the Marseillaise : To Arms, To Arms ! There is no other sound in the bright air. It is as if they heard under the grass, The dead men of the Marne, and their thin voice Used those young lips to sing it from their graves, The song that sang a nation into arms. And far away to the listening ear in the silence Like remote thunder throb the guns of France. 7 o THE ANTAGONISTS i Caverns mouthed with blackness more than night, Bog and jungle deep in strangling brier, Venom-breeding slime that loathest light, Who has plumbed your secret ? who the blind desire Hissing from the viper's lifted jaws, Maddening the beast with scent of prey Tracked through savage glooms on robber paws Till the slaughter gluts him red and reeking ? Nay, Man, this breathing mystery, this intense Body beautiful with thinking eyes, Master of the spirit outsoaring sense, Spirit of tears and laughter, who has measured all the skies, — Is he also the lair Of a lust, of a sting That hides from the air THE ANTAGONISTS 7* Yet is lurking to spring From the nescient core Of his fibre, alert At the trumpet of war And hungry to hurt, When he hears from abysses of time Aboriginal mutters, replying To something he knew not within him, And the Demon of Earth crying : " I am the will of the fire That bursts into boundless fury ; I am my own implacable desire. I am the will of the sea That shoulders the ships and breaks them ; There is none other but me." Heavy forests bred them, The race that dreamed. In the bones of savage earth Their dreams had birth : Darkness fed them. And the full brain grossly teemed With thoughts compressed, with rages Obstinate, stark, obscure — 72 THE ANTAGONISTS Thirsts no time assuages, But centuries immure. As the sap of trees, behind Crumpled bark of bossy boles, Presses up its juices blind, Buried within their souls The dream insatiate still Nursed its fierceness old And violent will, Haunted with twiilght where the Gods drink full Ere they renew their revelry of slaying, And warriors leap like the lion on the bull, And harsh horns in the northern mist are bray- ing. Tenebrous in them lay the dream Like a fire that under ashes Smoulders heavy-heaped and dim Yet with spurted stealthy flashes Sends a goblin shadow floating Crooked on the rafters — then Sudden from its den Springs in splendour. So should burst Destiny from dream, from thirst Rapture gloating On a vision of earth afar Stretched for a prize and a prey ; THE ANTAGONISTS 73 And the secular might of the Gods re-risen Savage and glorious, waiting its day, Should shatter its ancient prison And leap like the panther to slay, Magnificent ! Storm, then, and thunder The haughty to crush with the tame, For the world is the strong man's plunder Whose coming is swifter than flame ; And the nations unready, decayed, Unworthy of fate or afraid, Shall be stricken and torn asunder Or yield in shame. The Dream is fulfilled. Is it this that you willed, O patient ones ? For this that you gave Young to the grave Your valiant sons ? For this that you wore Brave faces, and bore The burden heart-breaking — Sublimely deceived, You that bled and believed — For the Dream ? or the Waking ? 74 THE ANTAGONISTS ii No drum-beat, pulsing challenge and desire, Sounded, no jubilant boast nor fierce alarm Cried throbbing from enfevered throats afire For glory, when from vineyard, forge, and farm, From wharf and warehouse, foundry, shop, and school, From the unreaped cornfield and the office-stool France called her sons ; but loth, but grave, But silent, with their purpose proud and hard Within them, as of men that go to guard More than life, yet to dare More than death : France, it was their France to save ! Nor now the fiery legend of old fames And that imperial Eagle whose wide wings Hovered from Vistula to Finistere, Who plucked the crown from Kings, Filled her ; but France was arming in her mind : The world unborn and helpless, not the past Victorious with banners, called her on ; And she assembled not her sons alone THE ANTAGONISTS 75 From city and hamlet, coast and heath and hill, But deep within her bosom, deeper still Than any fear could search, than any hope could blind, Beyond all clamours of her recent day, Hot smouldering of the faction and the fray, She summoned her own soul. In the hour of night, In the hush that felt the armed tread of her foes, Like a star, silent out of seas, it rose. Most human France ! In those clear eyes of light Was vision of the issue, and all the cost To the last drop of generous blood, the last Tears of the orphan and the widow ; and yet She shrank not from the terror of the debt, Seeing what else were with the cause undone, The very skies barred with an iron threat, The very mind of freedom lost Beneath that shadow bulked across the sun. Therefore did she abstain From all that had renowned her, all that won The world's delight : thought-stilled With deep reality to the heart she burned, And took upon her all the load of pain 76 THE ANTAGONISTS Foreknown ; and her sons turned From wife's and children's kiss Simply, and steady- willed With quiet eyes, with courage keen and clear, Faced Eastward. — If an English voice she hear, That has no speech worthy of her, let this Be of that day remembered, with what pride Our ancient island thrilled to the oceans wide, And our hearts leapt to know that England then, Equal in faith of free and loyal men, Stept to her side. 77 EDITH CAVELL She was binding the wounds of her enemies when they came — The lint in her hand unrolled. They battered the door with their rifle-butts, crashed it in : She faced them gentle and bold. They haled her before the judges where they sat In their places, helmet on head. With question and menace the judges assailed her, " Yes, I have broken your law," she said. " I have tended the hurt and hidden the hunted, have done As a sister does to a brother, Because of a law that is greater than that you have made, Because I could do none other. 78 EDITH CAVELL " Deal as you will with me. This is my choice to the end, To live in the life I vowed." " She is self-confessed," they cried, " she is self- condemned. She shall die that the rest may be cowed." In the terrible hour of the dawn, when the veins are cold, They led her forth to the wall. " I have loved my land," she said, " but it is not enough : Love requires of me all. " I will empty my heart of the bitterness, hating none." And sweetness filled her brave With a vision of understanding beyond the hour That knelled to the waiting grave. They bound her eyes, but she stood as if she shone. The rifles it was that shook When the hoarse command rang out. They could not endure That last, that defenceless look. EDITH CAVELL 79 And the officer strode and pistolled her surely, ashamed, That men, seasoned in blood, Should quail at a woman, only a woman, — dead As a flower stamped in the mud. And now that the deed was securely done, in the night When none had known her fate, They answered those that had striven for her, day by day : " It is over, you come too late." And with many words and sorrowful-phrased excuse Argued their German right To kill, most legally ; hard though the duty be, The law must assert its might. Only a woman ! yet she had pity on them, The victim offered slain To the gods of fear that they worship. Leave them there, Red hands, to clutch their gain ! 8° EDITH CAVELL She bewailed not herself, and we will bewail her not But with tears of pride rejoice That an English soul was found so crystal-clear To be triumphant voice Of the human heart that dares adventure all But live to itself untrue, And beyond all laws sees love as the light in the night, As the star it must answer to. The hurts she healed, the thousands comforted — these Make a fragrance of her fame. But because she stept to her star right on through death It is Victory speaks her name. 8i MID-ATLANTIC If this were all ! — A dream of dread Ran through me ; I watched the waves that fled Pale-crested out of hollows black, The hungry lift of helpless waves, A million million tossing graves, A wilderness without a track Beneath the barren moon : If this were all ! The stars of night remotely strewn Looked on that restless heave and fall. I seemed with them to watch this old Bright planet through the ages rolled, Self-tortured, burning splendours vain And fevered with its greeds insane And with the blood of peoples red ; I watched it, grown an ember cold, Join in the dancing of the dead. The dully half-moon sank ; the sound Of naked surges roared around, G 82 MID-ATLANTIC And through my heart the darkness poured Surges as of a sea unshored. 0 somewhere far and lost from light Blind Europe battled in the night ! Then sudden through the darkness came The vision of a child, A child with feet as light as flame Who ran across the bitter waves, Across the tumbling of the graves — With arms stretched out he smiled. 1 drank the wine of life again, I breathed among my brother men, I felt the human fire. I knew that I must serve the will Of beauty and love and wisdom still ; Though all my hopes were overthrown, Though universes turned to stone, I have my being in this alone And die in that desire. On board the " Lusitania," December, 1914. 83 THE CAUSE Out of these throes that search and sear What is it so deep arises in us Above the shaken thoughts of fear, — Whatever thread the Fates may spin us, — Above the horror that would drown And tempest that would strike us down ? It is to stand in cleansing light, The cloud of dullard habit lifted, To use a certainty of sight And breathe an air by peril sifted, The things that once we deemed of price Consumed in smoke of sacrifice. It is to feel the world we knew Changed to a wonder past our knowing ; The grass, the trees, the skiey blue, The very stones are inly glowing With something infinite behind These shadows, ardently divined. §4 THE CAUSE We went our ways ; each bosom bore Its spark of separate desire ; But each now kindles to the core With faith from this transfusing fire, Whereto our inmost longings run To be made infinitely one With that which nothing can destroy, Which lives when all is crushed and taken, The home of dearer than our joy, By all save by the soul forsaken Who strips her clean of doubt and care Because she breathes her native air, Yet not in scorn of lovely earth And human sweetness born of living, For these are grown of dearer worth, A gift more precious in the giving, Since through this raiment's hues and lines The glory of the spirit shines. Faces of radiant youth, that go Like rivers singing to the sea ! You count no careful cost ; you know ; Of that far secret you are free ; And life in you its splendour spending Sings the stars' song that has no ending. BEFORE THE DAWN BEFORE THE DAWN Blacker the night grows ere the dawn be risen, Keener the cost, and fiercer yet the fight. But hark ! above the thunder and the terror A trumpet blowing splendid through the night. It is the challenge of our dead undying Calling, Remember ! we have died for you. It is the cry of perilled earth's hereafter — Sons of our sons — Be glorious, be true I Now in the hour when either world is witness, Never or now shall we be proven great, Rise to the height of all our strain and story, Ay, and beyond ; for we ourselves are Fate. 87 88 GALLIPOLI Isles of the Aegean, Troy, and waters of Helles- pont ! You we have known from of old, Since boyhood stammering glorious Greek was entranced In the tale that Homer told. There scornful Achilles towered and flamed through the battle, Defying the gods ; and there Hector armed, and Andromache proudly held up his boy to him, Knowing not yet despair. We beheld them as presences moving beautiful and swift In the radiant morning of Time, Far from reality, far from dulness of daily doing And from cities of fog and grime ; — Unattainable day-dream, heroes, gods and goddesses Matched in splendour of war, GALLIPOLI 8 9 Days of a vanished world, days of a grandeur perished, Days that should bloom no more. But now shall our boyhood learn to tell a new tale, And a new song shall be sung, And the sound of it shall praise not magnifi- cence of old time But the glory and the greatness of the young. Deeds of this our own day, marvellous deeds of our own blood ; Sons that their sires excel, Lightly going into peril and taking death by the hand ; — Of these they shall sing, they shall tell. How in ships sailing the famed Mediterranean From armed banks of Nile Men from far homes in sunny Austral Dominions And the misty mother-isle, Met in the great cause, joined in the vast adven- ture, Saw first in April skies Beyond storied islands, Gallipoli's promontory Impregnably ridged, arise. go GALLIPOLI And how from the belly of the black ship, driven beneath Towering scarp and scaur Hailing hidden rages of fire in terrible gusts On the murdered space of shore, Into the water they leapt, they rushed and across the beach, With impetuous shout, all Inspired beyond men, climbed and were over the crest As a flame leaps over a wall. Not all the gods in heaven's miraculous panoply Could have hindered or stayed them, so Irresistibly came they, scaled the unscaleable and sprang To stab the astonished foe, Marvellous doers of deeds, lifted past our ima- gining To a world where death is nought ! As spirit against spirit, as a liberated element, As fire in flesh they fought. Now to the old twilight and pale legendary glories, By our own youth outdone, GALLIPOLI 91 Those shores recede ; not there, but in memory everlasting The immortal heights were won. Of them that triumphed, of them that fell, there is only now Silence, and sleep, and fame, And in night's immensity far on that promon- tory's altar An invisibly burning flame. 9 2 THE DISTANT GUNS Negligently the cart-track descends into the valley ; The drench of the rain has passed and the clover breathes ; Scents are abroad ; in the valley a mist whitens Along the hidden river, where the evening smiles. The trees are asleep, their shadows are longer and longer, Melting blue in the tender twilight ; above, In a pallor, barred with lilac and ashen cloud, Delicate as a spirit the young moon brightens ; And distant a bell intones the hour of peace, Where roofs of the village, gray and red, cluster In leafy dimness. Peace, old as the world ! The crickets shrilling in the high wet grass, And gnats, clouding upon the frail wild roses, Murmur of you ; but hark ! like a shudder upon the air, Ominous and alien, knocking on the farther hills THE DISTANT GUNS 93 As with airy hammers, the ghosts of terrible sound, — Guns ! From afar they are knocking on human hearts Everywhere over the silent evening country, Knocking with fear and dark presentiment. Only The moon's beauty, where no life nor joy is, Brightening softly and knowing nothing,|has peace. Arc-en-Barrois, 1916. 94 MEN OF VERDUN There are five men in the moonlight That by their shadows stand : Three hobble humped on crutches, And two lack each a hand. Frogs somewhere near the roadside Chorus a chant absorbed ; But a hush breathes out of the dream-light That far in heaven is orbed. It is gentle as sleep falling And wide as thought can span, The ancient peace and wonder That brims the heart of man. Beyond the hills it shines now On no peace but the dead, On reek of trenches thunder-shocked, Tense fury of wills in wrestle locked, A chaos crumbled red ! MEN OF VERDUN 95 The five men in the moonlight Chat, joke, or gaze apart. They talk of days and comrades ; But each one hides his heart. They wear clean cap and tunic, As when they went to war ; A gleam comes where the medal's pinned : But they will fight no more. The shadows, maimed and antic, Gesture and shape distort, Like mockery of a demon dumb Out of the hell-din whence they come That dogs them for his sport. But as if dead men were risen And stood before me there With a terrible flame about them blown In beams of spectral air, I see them, men transfigured As in a dream, dilate Fabulous with the Titan-throb Of battling Europe's fate ; MEN OF VERDUN For history's hushed before them, And legend flames afresh. Verdun, the name of thunder, Is written on their flesh. 97 LA PATRIE Through storm-blown gloom the subtle light persists ; Shapes of tumultuous, ghostly cloud appear, Trailing a dark shower from hill-drenching mists : Dawn, desolate in its majesty, is here. But ere the wayside trees show leaf and form Invisible larks in all the air around Ripple their songs up through the gloom and storm, As if the baulked light had won wings of sound ! A wounded soldier on his stretcher waits His turn for the ambulance, by the glimmering rails. He is wrapped in a rough brown blanket, like his mates. Over him the dawn broadens, the cloud pales. H 9 8 LA PATRIE Muscular, swart, bearded, and quite still, He lies, too tired to think, to wonder. Drops From a leaf fall by him. For spent nerve and will The world of shattering and stunned effort stops. He feels the air, song-thrilled and fresh and dim, And close about him smells the rainy soil. It is ever-living Earth recovers him, Friend and companion of old, fruitful toil. He is patient with her patience. Hurt, he takes Strength from her rooted, still tenacities. The will to heal, that secretly remakes, Like slumber, holds his dark, contented eyes. For she, though — never reckoning of the cost — Full germs of all profusion she prepares, Knows tragic hours, too, parching famine, frost And wreck ; and in her children's hurt she shares. Build what we may, house us in lofty mind's Palaces, wean the fine-wrought spirit apart, Earth touches where the fibre throbs, and winds The threads about us of her infinite heart. LA PATRIE 99 And some dear ground with its own changing sky, As if it were our feeling flesh, is wrought Into the very body's dignity And private colour of least conscious thought. O when that loud invader burned and bruised This ordered land's old kindness, with brute blows Shamed and befouled and plundered and abused, Was it not Earth that in her soldier rose And armed him, terrible and simple ? He Takes his wound, mute as Earth is, yet as strong. — The funeral clouds trail, wet wind shakes the tree, But all the wild air of the dawn is song. Latrecy, 1916. IOO THE DEPORTATION i In vain, in vain, in vain ! Conqueror, you are conquered : though you grind Those bodies, heel on neck ; and though you twist Out of them the exquisite last wrench of pain, They rise, they rise again, Rise quivering and eternally resist All cunning that all cruelty can find To mock the heart and lacerate the mind In vain, in vain ! ii The train stands packed for exile, truck on truck. Men thronged like oxen, pressed against each other, With worse than anger in their dangerous eyes, THE DEPORTATION Look on their drivers, armed and helmeted, — Then forget all in sudden stormy cries As past the bayonets sister, wife, and mother Strain up to them, clutch fingers tight, are struck And beaten back, but struggle and press again, Catch desolated kisses, fight for breath To sob their widowed hearts out in a word Their man shall hear, reckless of wound or death So they come nigh him ; a farewell insane, A passion as if the earth that bore them heard And in her bones groaned ! And white children held On shoulders where the torn dress hangs in strips Cry Father ! and mute answers wring the lips Of the exiles, in their torture still unquelled. A whistle screams. The guards drive, shout, beat. Then An inspiration like an ecstasy Seizes these women, and they rush to throw Their sobbing bodies prone upon the tracks Before the panting engine. If their men Into that night of slavery must go, THE DEPORTATION They'll be with death before them ! Prostrate there, Tear-blinded, with tense arms and heaving backs, Young wife and child and mother of grey hair Clutch the rails, anguished and athirst to die, While over them the towering engine throbs, Blind, ignorant, deaf, and ready. But you spare Such easiness of end, you who did this Which the sun looked on, and which History Shall see for ever. Though they cling with sobs To their own earth, frenzied and bleeding, swift They are harried up ; the bayonets prise and lift And tear away their hands' despairing grasp ; They are tossed on either side : at the engine's hiss The wheels begin that road which curses pave Between those piteous heaps that cry and gasp Helpless, and cheated even of their grave. THE DEPORTATION 103 in But something lives and burns More perilous to assail Than flesh of bodies frail : It waits and it returns. And when in the night you dream Of the day that you did this thing, When you see those eyes and the bayonet's gleam And the shrieks to your very heart's blood ring As you do your deed in your dream again, The soul of the race that you racked, to do Your Lord's command, that you thought to have cowed, Shall sharpen the bitterness thrice for you As it rises before you, crying aloud : You did it in vain, in vain ! io4 THE BELLS OF YPRES On the road to Ypres, on the long road, Marching strong, We'll sing a song of Ypres, of her glory And her wrong. Proud rose her towers in the old time, Long ago. Trees stood on her ramparts, and the water Lay below. Shattered are the towers into potsherds — Jumbled stones. Underneath the ashes that were rafters Whiten bones. Blood is in the cellar where the wine was, On the floor. Rats run on the pavement where the wives met At the door. But in Ypres there's an army that is biding, Seen of none, You'd never hear their tramp, nor see their shadow In the sun. THE BELLS OF YPRES 105 Thousands of the dead men there are waiting Through the night, Waiting for a bugle in the cold dawn Blown for fight. Listen when the bugle's calling Forward ! They'll be found, Dead men, risen in battalions From underground, Charging with us home, and through the foemen Driving fear Swifter than the madness in a madman, As they hear Dead men ring the bells of Ypres For a sign, Hear the bells and fear them in the Hun-land Over Rhine ! o6 ENGLAND'S POET Written for the Shakespeare Tercentenary To other voices, other majesties, Removed this while, Peace shall resort again. But he was with us in our darkest pain And stormiest hour : his faith royally dyes The colours of our cause ; his voice replies To all our doubt, dear spirit ! heart and vein Of England's old adventure ! his proud strain Rose from our earth to the sea-breathing skies. Even over chaos and the murdering roar Comes that world-winning music, whose full stops Sounded all man, the bestial and divine ; Terrible as thunder, fresh as April drops. He stands, he speaks, the soul-transfigured sign Of all our story, on the English shore. io7 GOING WEST Just as I came Into the empty, westward-facing room, A sudden gust blew wide The tall window ; at once A shock of sudden light, vibrating like a flame, Entered, as if it were the wind's bright spirit Stealing to me upon some secret quest. The wonder of the West Burst open ; under dark and rushing cloud That rained illumined drops, it glorified Each corner where so dazzlingly it struck : The shadows cowered, the brilliance overflowed. As suddenly, all faded. Wet, wild air blew in At the idly-swinging door Stormily crumpled fallen shreds of leaves, Dried scarlet and burnt yellow and ashy brown : They fluttered in like fears and blew across the floor. And I, to the heart invaded, Felt as that wild light palpitated through me io8 GOING WEST And died in a moment down, Exalted by a visionary fear That from the light more than the shadow fell ; A divination of splendid spirits near, Of glorious parting and of great farewell. ic>9 THE BEREAVED We grudged not those that were dearer than all we possessed, Lovers, brothers, sons. Our hearts were full, and out of a full heart We gave our beloved ones. Because we loved, we gave. In the hardest hour When at last — so much unsaid In the eyes — they went, simply, with tender smile, Our hearts to the end they read. They to their deeds ! To things that their soul hated, And yet to splendours won From smoking hell by the spirit that moved in them ; But we to endure alone. no THE BEREAVED Their hearts rested on ours ; their homing thoughts Met ours in the still of the night. We ached with the ache of the long waiting, and throbbed With the throbs of the surging fight. O had we failed them, then were we desolate now And separated indeed. What should have comforted, what should have helped us then In the time of our bitter need ! But now, though sorrow be ever fresh, sorrow Is tender as love ; it knows That of love it was born, and Love with the shining eyes The hard way chose. And out of deeps eternal, night and day, A strength our sorrow frees, Flooding us, full as the tide up the rivers flows From the depth of the silent seas ; THE BEREAVED A strength that is mightier far than we, yet a strength Whereof our spirit is breath, Hope of the world, that is strange to hazard and fear, To the wounds of Time, and Death. 112 THE SIBYLS Rending the waters of a night unknown The ship with tireless pulses bore me, On the shadowy deck musing late and lone, Over waste ocean. The rustling of the cordage in the dewy wind And the sound of idle surges Falling prolonged and for ever again up-thrown Drowsed me ; I slept, I dreamed. Out of the seas that streamed In ghostly turbulence moving and glimmering about me I saw the rising of vast and visionary forms. Like clouds, like continents of cloud, they rose August as the shape of storms In the silence before the thunder, or of moun- tains Alone in a sky of sunken light : they rose Slowly, with shrouded grandeur THE SIBYLS "3 Of queenly bosom and shoulder ; and afar Their countenances were lifted, although veiled, Although heavy as with thought and with silence, In the heights where dimly gathered Star upon solitary star. And it seemed to me, as I dreamed, That these were the forms of the Sibyls of old, Prophetesses whose eyes were aflame with in- terior fire, Who passionately prophesied and none com- prehended, In the womb of whose thought was quickened the world's desire, Who saw, and because they saw, chastised With voices terribly chanting on the wind The folly of the faithlessness of men. But not as they haunted then In cavernous and wild places, Each inaccessibly sequestered And sought with furtive steps Through wizard leaves of whispering laurel feared, »4 THE SIBYLS Now to me they appeared. But rather like Queens of fabulous dominion Like Queens, voices of a voiceless people, Queens of old time, with aweing faces, With burdened brows but with proud eyes, Assembled in solemn parley, to shape Futurity and the nations' glory and doom, They were met in the night together. And lo ! beneath them The immeasureable circle of the gloom Phantasmally disclosed In apparition all the coasts of the world, Veined with rivers afar to the frozen mountains. And I saw the shadow of maniac Death Like a reveller there stagger glutted and gloating. I saw murdered cities That raised like a stiffened arm One blackened tower to heaven ; I saw Processions of the homeless crawling into the distances ; And sullen leagues of interminable battle ; And peoples arming afar ; the very earth, The very bowels of the earth infected With the rages and the agonies of men. THE SIBYLS "5 For a moment the vision gleamed, and then was gone. Gloom rushed down like rain. But out of the midst of the darkness My flesh was aware of a sound, The peopled sound of moving millions And the voices of human pain. I lifted my gaze to the Sibyls, The Sibyls of the Continents, where they rose Looking one on another. Ancestral Asia, mother of musing mind, Was there ; and over against her Towered in the gates of the West a shape Of youth gigantic, troubled and vigilant ; Patient with eager dumbness in dark eyes, Africa rose ; and ardent out of the South The youngest of those great sisters ; and proud, With fame upon her for mantle, and regal- browed, The stature of Europe old. It seemed they listened to the murmur Of the anguished lands beneath them In sombre reverberation rising and upward rolled. "6 THE SIBYLS Everywhere battle and arming for battle, Famine and torture, odour of burning and blood, Doubt, hatred, terror, Rage and lamenting ! I heard sweet Pity crying between the earth and sky : But who had leisure for her call ? or who hearkened to her cry ? Not with our vision, and not with our horizon The gaze of the Sibyls was filled. Their trouble was trouble beyond the shaping of our fear, Their hope full-sailed upon oceans beyond our ken ; Their thoughts were the thoughts that build Towers for the dawn unseen. But nearer than ever before They drew to each other, sister to shrouded sister, Queen to superb Queen. What counsel took they together ? or what word THE SIBYLS 117 Of power and of parturition Passed their lips ? What saw they, Conferring among the stars ? My blood tingled, and I heard Syllables, O too vast For capacity of my ears, yet within me, In the innermost bones and caves of my being I felt a voice like the voice of a sea, And the sound of it seemed to be crying : " Endure ! Humble yourselves, O dreamers of dreams, In whose bosom is peril fiercer than fire or beast, Humble yourselves, O desolaters of your own dreams, Then arise and remember ! Though now you cry in astonishment and anguish ' What have we done to the beauty of the world That it ruins about us in ashes and blood ? ' Remember the Spirit that moulded and made you In the beauty of the body Shaped as the splendour of speech to thought, The Spirit that wills with one desire, With infinite else unsatisfied desire, Peace, not made by conquerors and armies, "8 THE SIBYLS Peace born in the soul, that asks not shelter or a pillow, The peace of truth, unshaken amid the thunder, Unaff righted by fury of shrivelling fire, And neither time nor tempest Neither slumber nor calamity, Neither rending of the flesh nor breaking of the heart, Shall stay you from that desire." That sound floated like a cloud in heaven, Lingering ; and like an answer Came the sound of the rushing of spirits trium- phant, Of young men dying for a cause. I lifted my eyes in wonder. And silence filled me. And with the silence I was aware Of a breath moving in the glimmer of the air. The stars had vanished ; but again I beheld those Sibyls august Over stilled ocean, And on their faces the dawn. Even as I looked, they lifted up their heads, THE SIBYLS 119 They lifted their heads, like eagles That slowly shake and widen their wondrous wings ; They arose and vanished like the stars. The light of the changed world, the world new- born, Brimmed over the silence of the seas ; But even in the rising of its beam I remembered the light in their eyes. 120 TO THE END Because the time has stript us bare Of all things but the thing we are, Because our faith requires us whole And we are seen to the very soul, Rejoice ! from now all meaner fears are fled. Because we have no prize to win Auguster than the truth within, And by consuming of the dross Magnificently lose our loss, Rejoice ! we have not vainly borne and bled. Because we chose beyond recall And for dear honour hazard all, And summoned to the last attack Refuse to falter or look back, Rejoice ! we die, the Cause is never dead, THE NEW WORLD MORN LIKE A THOUSAND SHINING SPEARS Morn like a thousand shining spears Terrible in the East appears. O hide me, leaves of lovely gloom, Where the young Dreams like lilies bloom ! What is this music that I lose Now, in a world of fading clues ? What wonders from beyond the seas And wild Arabian fragrancies ? In vain I turn me back to where Stars made a palace of the air. In vain I hide my face away From the too bright invading Lay. That which is come requires of me My utter truth and mystery. Return, you dreams, return to Night : My lover is the armed Light. 123 2 4 THE NEW WORLD To the people of the United States Now is the time of the splendour of Youth and Death. The spirit of man grows grander than men knew. The unbearable burden is borne, the impossible done ; Though harder is yet to do Before this agony end, and that be won We seek through blinding battle, in choking breath, — The New World, seen in vision ! Land of lands, In the midst of storms that desolate and divide, In the hour of the breaking heart, O far- descried, You build our courage, you hold up our hands. Men of America, you that march to-day Through roaring London, supple and lean of limb, Glimpsed in the crowd I saw you, and in your eye Something alert and grim, THE NEW WORLD 125 As knowing on what stern call you march away To the wrestle of nations ; saw your heads held high And, that same moment, far in a glittering beam High over old and storied Westminster The Stars and Stripes with England's flag astir, Sisterly twined and proud on the air astream. Men of America, what do you see ? Is it old Towers of fame and grandeur time-resigned ? The frost of custom's backward-gazing thought ? Seek closer ! You shall find Miracles hour by hour in silence wrought ; Births, and awakenings ; dyings never tolled ; Invisible crumble and fall of prison-bars. O, wheresoever his home, new or decayed, Man is older than all the things he has made And yet the youngest spirit beneath the stars. Rock-cradled, white, and soaring out of the sea, I behold again the fabulous city arise, Manhattan ! Queen of thronged and restless bays And of daring ships is she. "6 THE NEW WORLD 0 lands beyond, that into the sunset gaze, Limitless, teeming continent of surmise ! 1 drink again that diamond air, I thrill To the lure of a wonder more than the wondrous past, And see before me ages yet more vast Rising, to challenge heart and mind and will. What sailed they out to seek, who of old came To that bare earth and wild, unhistoried coast ? Not gold, nor granaries, nay, nor a halcyon ease For the weary and tempest -tost : The unshaken soul they sought, possessed in peace. What seek we now, and hazard all on the aim ? In the heart of man is the undiscovered earth Whose hope's our compass ; sweet with glorious passion Of men's good-will ; a world to forge and fashion Worthy the things we have seen and brought to birth. Taps of the Drum ! Now once again they beat : And the answer comes ; a continent arms. Dread, THE NEW WORLD ™7 Pity, and Grief, there is no escape. The call Is the call of the risen Dead. Terrible year of the nations' trampling feet ! An angel has blown his trumpet over all From the ends of the earth, from East to utter- most West, Because of the soul of man, that shall not fail, That will not make refusal, or turn, or quail, No, nor for all calamity, stay its quest. And here, here too, is the New World, born of pain In destiny-spelling hours. The old world breaks Its mould, and life runs fierce and fluid, a stream That floods, dissolves, re-makes. Each pregnant moment, charged to its extreme, Quickens unending future, and all's vain But the onward mind, that dares the oncoming years And takes their storm, a master. Life shall then Transfigure Time with yet more marvellous men. Hail to the sunrise ! Hail to the Pioneers ! 28 THE SOWER (Eastern France) Familiar, year by year, to the creaking wain Is the long road's level ridge above the plain. To-day a battery comes with horses and guns On the straight road, that under the poplars runs, At leisurely pace, the guns with mouths declined, Harness merrily ringing, and dust behind. Makers of widows, makers of orphans, they Pass to their burial business, alert and gay. But down in the field, where sun has the furrow dried, Is a man who walks in the furrow with even stride. At every step, with elbow jerked across, He scatters seed in a quick, deliberate toss, The immemorial gesture of Man confiding To Earth, that restores tenfold in a season's gliding. He is grave and patient, sowing his children's bread : He treads the kindly furrow, nor turns his head. STONEHENGE Gaunt on the cloudy plain Stand the great Stones, Dwarfed in the vast reach Of a sky that owns All the measure of earth Within its cloud-hung cave. Dumb stands the Circle As on a God's grave. But clattering with horses Up from the valley, With horses and horsemen At a trot, gaily Dragging the limbered guns, Youth comes riding, — Easy sits, mettlesome Horses bestriding. STONEHENGE Fast come the twinkling hoofs, Light wheels and guns, Invading the upland, And sweep past the Stones. Giant those shapes now Over them tower, — Time's dark stature Over Youth's fleet hour. Ribs of dismemoried Earth, Guard what you may ! The Immortals also Pass, nor stay. i3i GUNS AT THE FRONT Man, simple and brave, easily confiding, Giving his all, glad of the sun's sweetness, Heeding little of pitiful incompleteness, Mending life with laughter and cheerful chiding, Where is he ? — I see him not, but I hear Sounds, charged with nothing but death and maiming ; Earth and sky empty of all but flaming Bursts, and shocks that stun the waiting ear ; Monsters roaring aloud with hideous vastness, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing ! And man that made them Mightier far than himself, has stooped, and obeyed them, Schooled his mind to endure its own aghast ness, Serving death, destruction, and things inert,— He the soarer, free of heavens to roam in, *32 GUNS AT THE FRONT He whose heart has a world of light to home in, Confounding day with darkness, flesh with dirt. O, dear indeed the cause that so can prove him, Pitilessly self-tested ! If no cause beaconed Beyond this chaos, better he bled unreckoned, With his own monsters bellowing madness above him. 133 THE WITNESSES i Lads in the loose blue, Crutched, with limping feet, With bandaged arm, that roam To-day the bustling street, You humble us with your gaze, Calm, confiding, clear ; You humble us with a smile That says nothing but cheer. Our souls are scarred with you ! Yet, though we suffered all You have suffered, all were vain To atone, or to recall The robbed future, or build The maimed body again Whole, or ever efface What men have done to men. THE WITNESSES ii Each body of straight youth, Strong, shapely, and marred, Shines as out of a cloud Of storm and splintered shard, Of chaos, torture, blood, Fire, thunder, and stench : And the savage shattering noise Of churned and shaken trench Echoes through myriad hearts In the dumb lands behind ; — Silent wailing, and bitter Tears of the world's mind ! You stand upon each threshold Without complaint. — What pen Dares to write half the deeds That men have done to men ? in Must we be humbled more ? Peace, whose olive seems A tree of hope and heaven, Of answered prayers and dreams, THE WITNESSES Peace has her own hid wounds She also grinds and maims. And must we bear and share Those old continued shames ? Not only the body's waste But the mind's captivities — Crippled, sore, and starved— The ignorant victories Of the visionless, who serve No cause, and fight no foe ! Is a cruelty less sure Because its ways are slow ? Now we have eyes to see. Shall we not use them then ? These bright wounds witness us What men may do to men. 136 I AM HERE, AND YOU I am here, and you ; The sun blesses us through Leaves made of light. The air is in your hair ; You hold a flower. O worlds, that roll through night, O Time, O terrible year, Where surges of fury and fear Rave, to us you gave This island-hour. i37 DARK WIND In the middle of the night, waking, I was aware Of the Wind like one riding through black wastes of the air, Moodily riding, ever faster, he recked not where. The windows rattled aloud : a door clashed and sprang ; And the ear in fear waited to feel the inert clang Strike the shaken darkness, a cruelty and a pang. I was hurt with pity of things that have no will of their own, Lifted in lives of others and cast on bruising stone : I feared the Wind, coming a power from worlds unknown. i38 DARK WIND It was like a great ship now, abandoned, her crew dead, Driving in gulfs of sky ; it staggered above and sped ; I lay in the deeps and heard it rushing over my head. And the helpless shaking of window and door's desolate rebound Seemed like tossing and lifting of bodies lost and drowned In the huge indifferent swell, in the waters' wandering sound. 139 HUNGER I come among the peoples like a shadow. I sit down by each man's side. None sees me, but they look on one another, And know that I am there. My silence is like the silence of the tide That buries the playground of children ; Like the deepening of frost in the slow night, When birds are dead in the morning. Armies trample, invade, destroy, With guns roaring from earth and air. I am more terrible than armies, I am more feared than the cannon. Kings and chancellors give commands ; I give no command to any ; 140 HUNGER But I am listened to more than kings And more than passionate orators. I unswear words, and undo deeds. Naked things know me. I am first and last to be felt of the living. I am Hunger. STRIKE STONE ON STEEL Strike stone on steel, Fire replies. Strike men that feel, The answer is in their eyes. Powers that are willed to break The spirit in limbs of pain, See what spirit you wake ! Strike, and strike again ! You hammer sparks to a flame, And the flame scorches your hand You have given the feeble an aim, You have made the sick to stand. You shape by stroke on stroke Man mightier than he knew ; And the fire your hammer woke Is a life that is death to you. 142 SPRING HAS LEAPT INTO SUMMER Spring has leapt into Summer. A glory has gone from the green. The flush of the poplar has sobered out, The flame in the leaf of the lime is dulled : But I am thinking of the young men Whose faces are no more seen. Where is the pure blossom That fell and refused to grow old ? The clustered radiance, perfumed whiteness, Silent singing of joy in the blue ? — I am thinking of the young men Whose splendour is under the mould. Youth, the wonder of the world, Open-eyed at an opened door, When the world is as honey in the flower, and as wine To the heart, and as music newly begun ! SPRING HAS LEAPT 143 O the young men, the myriads of the young men, Whose beauty returns no more ! Spring will come, when the Earth remembers, In sun-bursts after the rain, And the leaf be fresh and lovely on the bough, And the myriad shining blossom be born : But I shall be thinking of the young men Whose eyes will not shine on us again. i 4 4 THE ENGLISH YOUTH There is a dimness fallen on old fames. Our hearts are solemnized with dearer names Than Time is bright with : we have not heard alone, Or read of it in books ; it is our own Eyes that have seen this wonder ; like a song, It is in our mouths for ever. There was wrong Done, and the world shamed. Honour blew the call ; And each one's answer was as natural And quiet as the needle's to the pole. Who gave must give himself entire and whole. So, books were shut ; and young dreams shaken out In cold air ; dear ambitions done without, And a stark duty shouldered. And yet they Who now must narrow to their arduous day Did not forget their nurture, nor the kind Muses of earth, nor joys of eager mind, — Graced in their comradeship, and prizing more Life's beauty, and all the sweetness at the core, THE ENGLISH YOUTH hs Because of that loathed business they were set To do and finish. It was the world's debt, Claiming all : but they knew, and would not wince From that exaction on their flesh ; and since They did not seek for glory, our hearts add A more than glory to that hope they had And gloriously and terribly achieved. O histories of old time, half -believed, None needs to wrong the modesty of truth In matching with your legend England's youth. But all renown that fearless arms could win For proud adventuring wondrous Paladin Is glimmering laurel now : Romance, that was The coloured air of a forgotten cause About the heads of heroes dead and bright, Shines home. We are accompanied with light Because of youth among us ; and the name Of man is touched with an ethereal flame ; There is a newness in the world begun, A difference in the setting of the sun. Oh, though we stumble in blinding tears, and though The beating of our hearts may never know Absence in pangs more desolately keen, Yet blessed are our eyes because they have seen. L 146 OXFORD IN WAR-TIME What alters you, familiar lawn and tower, Arched alley, and garden green to the grey wall With crumbling crevice and the old wine-red flower, Solitary in summer sun ? for all Is like a dream : I tread on dreams ! No stir Of footsteps, voices, laughter ! Even the chime Of many-memoried bells is lonelier In this neglected ghostliness of Time. What stealing touch of separation numb Absents you ? Yet my heart springs up to adore The shrining of your soul, that is become Nearer and oh, far dearer than before. It is as if I looked on the still face Of a Mother, musing where she sits alone. She is with her sons, she is not in this place ; She is gone out into far lands unknown. OXFORD IN WAR-TIME M7 Because that filled horizon occupies Her heart with mute prayer and divining fear, Therefore her hands so calm lie, and her eyes See nothing ; and men wonder at her here : But far in France ; on the torn Flanders plain ; By Sinai ; in the Macedonian snows ; The fly-plagued sands of Tigris, heat and rain ; On wandering water, where the black squall blows Less danger than the bright wave ambushes, She bears it out. All the long day she bears And the sudden hour of instant challenges To act, that searches all men, no man spares. She is with her sons, leaving a virtue gone Out of her sacred places : what she bred Lives other life than this, that sits alone, Though still in dream starrily visited ! For O in youth she lives, not in her age. Her soul is with the springtime and the young ; And she absents her from the learned page, Studious of high histories yet unsung, H8 oxford in war-time More passionately prized than wisdom's book Because her own. Her faith is in those eyes That clear into the gape of hell can look, Putting to proof ancient philosophies Such as the virgin Muses would rehearse Beside the silvery, swallow-haunted stream, Under the grey towers. But immortal verse Is now exchanged for its immortal theme — Victory ; proud loss ; and the enduring mind ; Youth, that has passed all praises, and has won More than renown, being that which faith divined, Reality more radiant than the sun. She gave, she gives, more than all anchored days Of dedicated lore, of storied art ; And she resigns her beauty to men's gaze To mask the riches of her bleeding heart. i 4 9 THE DEAD TO THE LIVING 0 you that still have rain and sun, Kisses of children and of wife And the good earth to tread upon, And the mere sweetness that is life, Forget not us, who gave all these For something dearer, and for you. Think in what cause we crossed the seas ! Remember, he who fails the Challenge Fails us too. Now in the hour that shows the strong — The soul no evil powers affray — Drive straight against embattled Wrong : Faith knows but one, the hardest, way. Endure ; the end is worth the throe. Give, give, and dare ; and again dare ! On, to that Wrong's great overthrow. We are with you, of you ; we the pain And victory share. !5° KITCHENER This is the man who, sole in Britain, sole In Europe, by profounder instinct, knew The strength of Britain ; and that strength he drew Slow into act, upshouldering the whole Vast weight of effort. Eyes full on the goal Saw nothing less ; he held his single clue, Heedless of obstacle ; intent to do His one task forthright with unshaken soul. This is the man whom, dead, the meanest match With their own stature ; give tongue, and grow brave On the imperfection fools have wit to espy. His silence towers the grander for their cry, Troubling his fame no more than yelp and scratch Of jackal could disturb that ocean-grave. THE TEST Naked reality, and menace near As fire to scorching flesh, shall not affright The spirit that sees, with danger-sharpened sight, What it must save or die for ; not the mere Name, but the thing, now doubly, trebly dear, Freedom ; the breath those hands would choke ; the light They would put out ; the clean air they would blight, Making earth rank with hate, and greed, and fear. Now no man's loss is private : all share all. Oh, each of us a soldier stands to-day, Put to the proof and summoned to the call ; One will, one faith, one peril. Hearts, be high, Most in the hour that's darkest ! Come what may, The soul in us is found, and shall not die. 152 YPRES She was a city of patience ; of proud name, Dimmed by neglecting Time ; of beauty and loss ; Of acquiescence in the creeping moss. But on a sudden fierce destruction came Tigerishly pouncing : thunderbolt and flame Showered on her streets, to shatter them and toss Her ancient towers to ashes. Riven across, She rose, dead, into never-dying fame. White against heavens of storm, a ghost, she is known To the world's ends. The myriads of the brave Sleep round her. Desolately glorified, She, moon-like, draws her own far-moving tide Of sorrow and memory ; toward her, each alone, Glide the dark Dreams that seek an English grave. INTO PEACE THE ARRAS ROAD i The early night falls on the plain In cloud and desolating rain. I see no more, but feel around The ruined earth, the wounded ground. There in the dark, on either side The road, are all the brave who died. I think not on the battles won ; I think on those whose day is done. Heaped mud, blear pools, old rusted wire, Cover their youth and young desire. Near me they sleep, and they to me Are dearer than their victory. 55 156 THE ARRAS ROAD ii Where now are they who once had peace Here, and the fruitful tilth's increase ? Shattered is all their hands had made, And the orchards where their children played. But night, that brings the darkness, brings The heart back to its dearest things. I feel old footsteps plodding slow On ways that they were used to know. And from my own land, past the strait, From homes that no more news await, Absenting thoughts come hither flying To the unknown earth where Love is lying. There are no stars to-night, but who Knows what far eyes of lovers true In star-like vigil, each alone Are watching now above their own ? THE ARRAS ROAD 157 in England and France unconscious tryst Keep in this void of shadowy mist By phantom Vimy, and mounds that tell Of ghostliness that was Gavrelle. The rain comes wildly down to drench Disfeatured ridge, deserted trench. Guns in the night, far, far away, Thud on the front beyond Cambrai. But here the night is holy, and here I will remember, and draw near, And for a space, till night be sped, Be with the beauty of the dead. 158 CAMBRAI The silence is a thing to feel and fear ; It is so human that it hurts the mind With all that is not, and that was, behind These gaping walls, this murdered blankness. Here To have had pity on the prisoner Was penal ; and like engines set to grind Spirit from flesh, the oppressors toiled to find Weakness, rejoiced if they could wring a tear. The houses seem to bleed round the great square, The silence is so living and intense. Yet what moves most my heart ? Not the dead stare Of Hate, full-glutted in its hideous will : It is the thought of Hate's dull impotence, It is the glory of all it cannot kill. *59 AN INCIDENT AT CAMBRAI In a by-street, blocked with rubble And any-way tumbled stones, Between the upstanding house-fronts' Naked and scorched bones, Chinese workmen were clearing The ruins, dusty and arid. Dust whitened the motley coats, Where each his burden carried. Silent they glided, all Save one, who passed me by With berry-brown high-boned cheeks And strange Eastern eye. And he sang in his outland tongue Among those ruins drear A high, sad, half-choked ditty That no one heeded to hear. i6o AN INCIDENT AT CAMBRAI Was it love, was it grief, that made For long-dead lips that song ? The desolation of Han, Or the Never-Ending Wrong ? The Rising Sun and the Setting, They have seen this ail as a scroll, Blood-smeared, that the endless years For the fame of men unroll. It was come from the ends of the earth And of Time in his ruin gray, That song, — the one human sound In the silence of Cambrai. October, 19 18. i6i THE UNRETURNING SPRING A leaf on the gray sand-path Fallen, and fair with rime ! A yellow leaf, a scarlet leaf, And a green leaf ere its time. Days rolled in blood, days torn, Days innocent, days burnt black, What is it the wind is sighing As the leaves float, swift or slack ? The year's pale spectre is crying For beauty invisibly shed, For the things that never were told And were killed in the minds of the dead. M 1 62 A DEDICATION The thousands of the brave, the happy young, Our loves and lovers, fallen in France, have shrined That earth for us, and France's name comes kind On English lips. But you, her children, sprung From the old liberal soil, so rudely wrung, Out of our own hard pain have we divined Your harder pain ; hurt body and tortured mind, Where those polluting claws have torn and clung. France, dear to men that honour human things , To have helped or heartened any of these your maimed And homeless, is itself felicity : It is to know what suffering man can be ; How great his heart, when fed from splendid springs ; What human virtue has made you loved and famed. AN ANTHEM OF THE FIVE NATIONS 0 God, our race of old went forth, Our seed about the world is sown From East to West, from South to North ; But, mother and children, we are one. Now we have passed the furnace-fire And seen the souls of men to shine, Lift up our hearts to thy desire, Confirm our faltering wills with thine ; One faith to keep, one hope to reap, One life to share, one death to dare. Who glories when another cowers Before him on a bended knee, His heart has never beat with ours ; The free alone can lead the free. To make a world of men that feel The wrong of each the wrong of all, And joy of man our Commonweal, — Behold our great adventure's call ! From North afar to Southern star, For this the dead together bled. i6 4 THE FIVE NATIONS 0 God of all our children, hew From us the stone that they shall build To beauty grander than we knew, Our effort in their songs fulfilled. Make strong our hand and heart ! Preserve The vision and the will that frees Within our spirits that proudly serve — The Sister Nations of the Seas : One faith to keep, one hope to reap, One life to share, one death to dare. *6 S PEACE i Lovely word flying like a bird across the narrow seas, When winter is over and songs are in the skies, Peace, with the colour of the dawn upon the name of her, A music to the ears, a wonder to the eyes ; Peace, bringing husband back to wife and son to mother soon, And lover to his love, and friend to friend, Peace, so long awaited and hardly yet believed in, The answer of faith, enduring to the end ; Tears are in our joy, because the heavy night is gone from us And morning brings the prisoner's release. How shall we sing her beauty and her blessed- ness, Saying at last to one another, Peace ? M 2 i66 PEACE ii Guns that boomed from shore to shore And smote the heart with distant dread Speak no more. The terror that bestrode the air, That under ocean kept his lair, Now is fled. in I see, as on a misty morn When a great ship towering glides To anchor, out of battle borne, And looms above her dinted sides, — Burning through the mist at last The sun flames on her splintered mast And the torn flag that from it floats, And cheering from a thousand throats Bursts from her splendour and her scars, — So I see our England come, Come at last from all her wars Proudly home. PEACE 167 IV Now let us praise the dead that are with us to-day, Who fought and fell before the morning shone, Happy and brave, an innumerable company ; This day is theirs, the day their deeds have won. Glory to them, and from our hearts a thanks- giving In humbleness and awe and joy and pride. We will not say that their place shall know no more of them, We will not say that they have passed and died : They are the living, they that bought this hour for us And spilt their blood to make the world afresh ; One with us, one with our children and their heritage, They live and move, a spirit in the flesh. i68 PEACE v With innocence of flowers and grass and dew Earth covers up her shame, her wounds, her rue. She pardons and remits ; she gives her grace, Where men had none, and left so foul a trace. Peace of the earth, peace of the sky, begins To sweeten and to cleanse our strifes and sins. The furious thunderings die away and cease. But what is won, unless the soul win peace ? VI Not with folding of the hands, Not with evening fallen wide Over waste and weary lands, Peace is come ; but as a bride. It is the trumpets of the dawn that ring ; It is the sunrise that is challenging. PEACE 169 VII Lovely word, flying like a light across the happy Land, When the buds break and all the earth is changed, Bringing back the sailor from his watch upon the perilled seas, Rejoining shores long severed and estranged, Peace, like the Spring, that makes the torrent dance afresh And bursts the bough with sap of beauty pent, Flower from our hearts into passionate recovery Of all the mind lost in that banishment. Come to us mighty as a young and glad deliverer From wrong's old canker and out-dated lease, Then will we sing thee in thy triumph and thy majesty, Then from our throes shall be prepared our peace. * NOTE Thanks are due to the Editors of various periodicals, English and American, for leave to reprint certain poems ; to Messrs. Methuen for permission to reprint " Europe 1901 " from The Death of Adam and to Mr. Heinemann for permission to reprint " Thunder on the Downs " from Auguries; also to the British Committee of the French Red Cross for a like permission in respect of "A Dedication," and to The Overseas Club in respect of "An Anthem of the Five Nations," originally written for music by Mr. Nicholas Gatty (musical rights reserved). The Author and Publisher desire to thank Mr. Strang for allowing them to reproduce the portrait printed as frontispiece to this volume. WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 3 3125 01451 6088 -1 fm