When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's work, You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land. There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk, And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his hand. It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong, And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song. [Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.] It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley, _Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates, Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David, Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _Hell Gate of Soissons_; Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_; Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said, "The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might have done Byron's, When the true lightning of his soul was bared, Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch. [Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Bronte_.]