It is, perhaps, in the best Canadian commemorative, elegiac, or reflective poems of the Great War that the three supreme excellences, Truth, Beauty, and Splendor of Ideas, in the war poetry of Canada are most conspicuously present. The distinctive presence of these qualities not only marks a clear advance beyond the older Canadian martial verse but also establishes a high place for Canadian commemorative, elegiac and reflective war verse in the body of war poetry written by poets of the Allied Nations. Truth, Beauty, or Splendor of Ideas are in Gertrude Bartlett’s _The Blessed Dead_, Grace Blackburn’s _Christ in Flanders_, Lillie Brooks’ _Bereaved_, Helena Coleman’s _Oh, Not When April Wakes the Daffodils_, Jean Blewett’s _The Lover Lads of Devon_, Lilian Leveridge’s _Over the Hills of Home_, Florence Randal Livesay’s _A Daffodil from Vimy Ridge_, Agnes Maule Machar’s _De Profundis_, Louise Morey Bowman’s _The White Garden_, Virna Sheard’s _The Young Knight_, Frederick George Scott’s _The Silent Toast_, Arthur Stringer’s _Christmas Bells in War Time_, Archibald Sullivan’s _The Plaint of the Children_, Beatrice Redpath’s _The Men of Canada_, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s _The Mother Gives_, John Stuart Thomson’s _His Darkest Hour_, A. E. S. Smythe’s noble sonnet _The Champions_, S. Morgan-Powell’s magniloquent _Kitchener’s Work_, and W. D. Lighthall’s magnificent and exalting poem _The Galahads_. One of the finest commemorative poems of the world war written by a Canadian is Duncan Campbell Scott’s sonnet _To a Canadian Lad Killed in the War_. It is fine in conception, novel in terminal endings and elevating in emotional appeal. But fine as it is, it pales in aesthetic and artistic dignity with the only Canadian war poem that has achieved sublimity—the same poet’s unforgettably noble elegiacs _To a Canadian Aviator (Who Died for His Country in France)_:— Tossed like a falcon from the hunter’s wrist A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise, And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist, The elastic stairway to the rising sun. Peril below thee and above, peril Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt Thy peerless heart; gathering wing and poise, Thy plane transfigured, and thy motor-chant Subdued to a whisper—then a silence,— And thou art but a disembodied venture In the void. But Death, who has learned to fly, Still matchless when his work is to be done, Met thee between the armies and the sun; Thy speck of shadow faltered in the sky; Then thy dead engine and thy broken wings Drooped through the arc and passed in fire, A wreath of smoke—a breathless exhalation. But ere that came, a vision sealed thine eyes, Lulling thy senses with oblivion; And from its sliding station in the skies Thy dauntless soul upward in circles soared To the sublime and purest radiance whence it sprang.