But knew the misery of the soaking trench, The freezing in the rigging, the despair In the revolting second of the wrench When the blind soul is flung upon the air, And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands For some idea but dimly understood Of an English city never built by hands Which love of England prompted and made good. * * * * * If there be any life beyond the grave, It must be near the men and things we love, Some power of quick suggestion how to save, Touching the living soul as from above, An influence from the Earth from those dead hearts So passionate once, so deep, so truly kind, That in the living child the spirit starts, Feeling companioned still, not left behind. Surely above these fields a spirit broods, A sense of many watchers muttering near, Of the lone Downland with the forlorn woods Loved to the death, inestimably dear, A muttering from beyond the veils of Death From long-dead men, to whom this quiet scene Came among blinding tears with the last breath, The dying soldier’s vision of his queen. All the unspoken worship of those lives Spent in forgotten wars at other calls Glimmers upon these fields where evening drives Beauty like breath, so gently darkness falls, Darkness that makes the meadows holier still. The elm-trees sadden in the hedge, a sigh Moves in the beech-clump on the haunted hill, The rising planets deepen in the sky, And silence broods like spirit on the brae, A glimmering moon begins, the moonlight runs Over the grasses of the ancient way Rutted this morning by the passing guns. BIOGRAPHY When I am buried, all my thoughts and acts Will be reduced to lists of dates and facts, And long before this wandering flesh is rotten The dates which made me will be all forgotten; And none will know the gleam there used to be About the feast-days freshly kept by me, But men will call the golden hour of bliss “About this time,” or “shortly after this.” Men do not heed the rungs by which men climb Those glittering steps, those milestones upon Time, Those tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth, Those moments of the soul in years of earth. They mark the height achieved, the main result, The power of freedom in the perished cult, The power of boredom in the dead man’s deeds, Not the bright moments of the sprinkled seeds.