with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the
volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried
Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods
that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted
fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the
strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Shelley
overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made
one with Nature.
He visits the deserted home of his dead friend--
'Ah, but there was no need to call his name,
He was beside me now, as swift as light ...
For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes
Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love.
My body is the magic of the world,
And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.'
And so the undying dead
'Wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung,
To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.'
Further, this war poetry, while reflecting military things with a
veracity hardly known before, is yet rarely militant. We must not look
for explicit pacifist or international ideas; but as little do we find
jingo patriotism or hymns of hate. The author of the German hymn of hate
was a much better poet than anyone who tried an English hymn in the same
key, and the English poets who could have equalled its form were above
its spirit. Edith Cavell's dying words 'Patriotism is not enough' cannot
perhaps be paralleled in these poets, but they are continually
suggested. They do not say, in the phrase of the old cavalier poet, that
we should love England less if we loved not something else more, or that
something is wanting in our love for our country if we wrong humanity in
its name. But the spirit which is embodied in these phrases breathes
through them; heroism matters more to them than victory, and they know
that death and sorrow and the love of kindred have no fatherland. They
'stand above the battle' as well as share in it, and they share in it
without ceasing to stand above it. The German is the enemy, they never
falter in that; and even death does not convert him into a friend. But
for this enemy there is chivalry, and pity, and a gleam, now and then,
of reconciling comradeship.
'He stood alone in some queer sunless place
Where Armageddon ends,'--
the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves
slain by his friend, the speaker. Their ghosts throng around him,--
'He stared at them, half wondering, and then
They told him how I'd killed them for his sake,
Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men:
At last he turned and smiled; smiled--all was well
Because his face would lead them out of hell.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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