writer, poet
1893 – 1918
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyesPassed from him to the strong men that were whole.
Bent double like old beggars under sacks,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their bootsBut limped on, blood-shod.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
He dropped, — more sullenly than wearily,Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
After the blast of lightning from the east,And wash, with an immortal water, age?
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.'
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
All a poet can do today is warn.
Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.