The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (6 page)

‘
On the idle hill of summer
'

On the idle hill of summer,

     Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

     Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder

     On the roads of earth go by,

Dear to friends and food for powder,

     Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten

10                  Bleach the bones of comrades slain,

Lovely lads and dead and rotten;

     None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,

     High the screaming fife replies,

Gay the files of scarlet follow:

     Woman bore me, I will rise.

A. E. Housman

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgement-day

And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe-cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;

10             It's gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

‘All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

‘That this is not the judgement-hour

For some of them's a blessed thing,

For if it were they'd have to scour

20             Hell's floor for so much threatening…

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).'

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,'

Said one, ‘than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!'

And many a skeleton shook his head.

30             ‘Instead of preaching forty year,'

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.'

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Thomas Hardy

The Eve of War

The night falls over London. City and sky

     Blend slowly. All the crowded plain grows dark.

     The last few loiterers leave the glooming park

To swell that mighty tide which still sweeps by,

Heedless save of its own humanity,

     Down to the Circus, where the staring arc

     Winks through the night, and every face shows stark

And every cheek betrays its painted lie.

But here through bending trees blows a great wind;

10                   Through torn cloud-gaps the angry stars

          look down.

Here have I heard this night the wings of War,

His dark and frowning countenance I saw.

      What dreadful menace hangs above our town?

Let all the great cities pray; for they have sinned.

Geoffrey Faber

On Receiving the First News of the War

Snow is a strange white word;

No ice or frost

Has asked of bud or bird

For Winter's cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow

From earth to sky

This Summer land doth know;

No man knows why.

In all men's hearts it is:

10             Some spirit old

Hath turned with malign kiss

Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face,

God's blood is shed:

He mourns from His lone place

His children dead.

O ancient crimson curse!

Corrode, consume;

Give back this universe

20             Its pristine bloom.

Isaac Rosenberg

The Marionettes

Let the foul Scene proceed:

     There's laughter in the wings;

'Tis sawdust that they bleed,

     But a box Death brings.

How rare a skill is theirs

     These extreme pangs to show,

How real a frenzy wears

     Each feigner of woe!

Gigantic dins uprise!

10                  Even the gods must feel

A smarting of the eyes

     As these fumes upsweal.

Strange, such a Piece is free,

     While we Spectators sit,

Aghast at its agony,

     Yet absorbed in it!

Dark is the outer air,

     Coldly the night draughts blow,

Mutely we stare, and stare

20                  At the frenzied Show.

Yet heaven hath its quiet shroud

     Of deep, immutable blue –

We cried ‘An end!' We are bowed

     By the dread, ‘'Tis true!'

While the Shape who hoofs applause

     Behind our deafened ear,

Hoots – angel-wise – ‘the Cause!'

     And affrights ev'n fear.

Walter de la Mare

August, 1914

How still this quiet cornfield is to-night!

By an intenser glow the evening falls,

Bringing, not darkness, but a deeper light;

Among the stooks a partridge covey calls.

The windows glitter on the distant hill;

Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold

Stumble on sudden music and are still;

The forlorn pinewoods droop above the wold.

An endless quiet valley reaches out

10             Past the blue hills into the evening sky;

Over the stubble, cawing, goes a rout

Of rooks from harvest, flagging as they fly.

So beautiful it is, I never saw

So great a beauty on these English fields

Touched by the twilight's coming into awe,

Ripe to the soul and rich with summer's yields.

*

These homes, this valley spread below me here,

The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,

Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear

20             To unknown generations of dead men,

Who, century after century, held these farms,

And, looking out to watch the changing sky,

Heard, as we hear, the rumours and alarms

Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.

And knew, as we know, that the message meant

The breaking-off of ties, the loss of friends,

Death like a miser getting in his rent,

And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.

The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,

30             The friendly horses taken from the stalls,

The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,

The cracks unplastered in the leaking walls.

Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home,

And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,

With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam

As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind,

Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs,

And so, by ship to sea, and knew no more

The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,

40             Nor the dear outline of the English shore,

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,

50             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

60             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,

70             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.

John Masefield

1914: Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His

            hour,

    And caught our youth, and wakened us from

            sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

     To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

     Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

     And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found

            release there,

10                  Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has

            mending,

        Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there

     But only agony, and that has ending;

        And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Rupert Brooke

Happy is England Now

There is not anything more wonderful

Than a great people moving towards the deep

Of an unguessed and unfeared future; nor

Is aught so dear of all held dear before

As the new passion stirring in their veins

When the destroying Dragon wakes from sleep.

Happy is England now, as never yet!

And though the sorrows of the slow days fret

Her faithfullest children, grief itself is proud.

10             Ev'n the warm beauty of this spring and summer

That turns to bitterness turns then to gladness

Since for this England the beloved ones died.

Happy is England in the brave that die

For wrongs not hers and wrongs so sternly hers;

Happy in those that give, give, and endure

The pain that never the new years may cure;

Happy in all her dark woods, green fields, towns,

Her hills and rivers and her chafing sea.

What'er was dear before is dearer now.

20             There's not a bird singing upon his bough

But sings the sweeter in our English ears:

There's not a nobleness of heart, hand, brain

But shines the purer; happy is England now

In those that fight, and watch with pride and tears.

John Freeman

‘
For All We Have and Are
' 1914

For all we have and are,

For all our children's fate,

Stand up and take the war,

The Hun is at the gate!

Our world has passed away,

In wantonness o'erthrown.

There is nothing left to-day

But steel and fire and stone!

      Though all we knew depart,

10                   The old Commandments stand: –

      ‘In courage keep your heart,

      In strength lift up your hand.‘

Once more we hear the word

That sickened earth of old: –

‘No law except the Sword

Unsheathed and uncontrolled.'

Once more it knits mankind,

Once more the nations go

To meet and break and bind

20             A crazed and driven foe.

Comfort, content, delight,

The ages' slow-bought gain,

They shrivelled in a night.

Only ourselves remain

To face the naked days

In silent fortitude,

Through perils and dismays

Renewed and re-renewed.

      Though all we made depart,

30                   The old Commandments stand: –

      ‘In patience keep your heart,

      In strength lift up your hand.‘

No easy hope or lies

Shall bring us to our goal,

But iron sacrifice

Of body, will, and soul.

There is but one task for all –

One life for each to give.

Who stands if Freedom fall?

40             Who dies if England live?

Rudyard Kipling

This is no case of petty Right or Wrong

This is no case of petty right or wrong