THE DEAD FOX HUNTER
"We found the little captain at the head;
His men lay well aligned.
We touched his hand, stone-cold, and he was dead,
And they, all dead behind,
Had never reached their goal, but they died well;
They charged in line, and in the same line fell.
"The well-known rosy colours of his face
Were almost lost in grey.
We saw that, dying and in hopeless case,
For others' sake that day
He'd smothered all rebellious groans: in death
His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth.
"For those who live uprightly and die true
Heaven has no bars or locks,
And serves all taste.... Or what's for him to do
Up there, but hunt the fox?
Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide
For one who rode straight and at hunting died.
"So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came,
Why, it must find one now:
If any shirk and doubt they know the game,
There's one to teach them how:
And the whole host of Seraphim complete
Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet."
I have a notion that this is a gallant poem which Englishmen will not allow to be forgotten. The great quality of Captain Graves' verse at present is its elated vivacity, which neither fire, nor pain, nor grief can long subdue. Acutely sensitive to all these depressing elements, his animal spirits lift him like an aeroplane, and he is above us in a moment, soaring through clouds of nonsense under a sky of unruffled gaiety. In our old literature, of which he is plainly a student, he has found a neglected author who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton, Henry VIII's Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a great deal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, The Tunning of Elinore Rummyng and Colin Clout. He likes rough metre, bad rhymes and squalid images: we suspect him of an inclination to be rude to his immediate predecessors. But his extreme modernness—"Life is a cliché—I would find a gesture of my own"—is, in the case of so lively a songster, an evidence of vitality. He promises a new volume, to be called Fairies and Fusiliers, and it will be looked forward to with anticipation.
All these poets seem to be drawn into relation to one another. Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are both Fusiliers, and they publish a στιχομυθία "on Nonsense," just as Cowley and Crashaw did "on Hope" two centuries and a half ago. Lieut. Sassoon's own volume is later than those which we have hitherto examined, and bears a somewhat different character. The gallantry of 1915 and the optimism of 1916 have passed away, and in Lieut. Sassoon's poems their place is taken by a sense of intolerable weariness and impatience: "How long, O Lord, how long?" The name-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execution, is a monologue by an ignorant and shrewd old huntsman, who looks back over his life with philosophy and regret. Like Captain Graves, he is haunted with the idea that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All Lieut. Sassoon's poems about horses and hunting and country life generally betray his tastes and habits. This particular poem hardly touches on the war, but those which follow are absorbed by the ugliness, lassitude, and horror of fighting. Lieut. Sassoon's verse has not yet secured the quality of perfection; he is not sufficiently alive to the importance of always hitting upon the best and only word. He is essentially a satirist, and sometimes a very bold one, as in "The Hero," where the death of a soldier is announced home in "gallant lies," so that his mother brags to her neighbours of the courage of her dead son. At the close of all this pious make-believe, the Colonel
"thought how 'Jack,' cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried
To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits";
or, again, as in "Blighters," where the sentimentality of London is contrasted with the reality in Flanders:
"The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din,
'We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!