They grieved not for the theatre’s high-banked tiers, Where restlessly the noisy crowd leans over, With laughter and with jostling, to discover The blue and green of chaffing charioteers. Nor for the fluted shafts, the carven stones Of that sole city, bright above the seas, Where young men met to talk with Socrates Or toss the ivory bones. Their eyes were lit with tumult and with risk, But when they felt Death touch their hands and pass They followed, dropping on the garden grass The parchment and the disk. It seemed no wrong to them that they must go. They laid their lives down as the poet lays On the white page the poem that shall praise His memory when the hand that wrote is low. Erect they stood and, festally arrayed, Serenely waited the transforming hour, Softly as Hyacinth slid from youth to flower, Or the shade of Cyparis to a cypress shade. They wept not for the lost Ionian days, Nor liberty, nor household love and laughter, Nor the long leaden slumber that comes after Life’s little wakefulness. Fearless they sought the land no sunsets see, Whence our weak pride shrinks back, and would return, Knowing a pinch of ashes in an urn Henceforth our garden and our house shall be. Young men, my brothers, you whose morning skies I have seen the deathly lassitude invade, Oh, how you suffered! How you were afraid! What death-damp hands you locked about your eyes! You, so insatiably athirst to spend The young desires in your hearts abloom, How could you think the desert was your doom, The waterless fountain and the endless end? You yearned not for the face of love, grown dim, But only fought your anguished bones to wrest From the Black Angel crouched upon your breast, Who scanned you ere he led you down with him. JEAN COCTEAU A MESSAGE This is our gift to the Homeless. What shall it bear from me Safe in a land that prospers Girded by leagues of sea?-- Tear moistened words of pity, Bountiful sympathy. Clearly we see the picture, Horror has fixed our eyes. Fighting to guard its hearthstones A nation mangled lies. Fire has charred its beauty, Murder has stilled its cries; And truths we love and cherish Hang in the trembling scale. If you win, we win by proxy, If you fail, we are doomed to fail. The world is beset by a monster, Yet we watch to see who shall prevail. Our souls are racked and quickened, But prudence counsels no. So we lavish our gold and pity And wait to see how it will go,-- This pivotal war of the ages With its heartrending ebb and flow.