If I must—if I must!
It is, perhaps, in the best Canadian commemorative, elegiac, or reflective poems of the Great War that the three supreme excellences, Truth, Beauty, and Splendor of Ideas, in the war poetry of Canada are most conspicuously present. The distinctive presence of these qualities not only marks a clear advance beyond the older Canadian martial verse but also establishes a high place for Canadian commemorative, elegiac and reflective war verse in the body of war poetry written by poets of the Allied Nations. Truth, Beauty, or Splendor of Ideas are in Gertrude Bartlett’s The Blessed Dead, Grace Blackburn’s Christ in Flanders, Lillie Brooks’ Bereaved, Helena Coleman’s Oh, Not When April Wakes the Daffodils, Jean Blewett’s The Lover Lads of Devon, Lilian Leveridge’s Over the Hills of Home, Florence Randal Livesay’s A Daffodil from Vimy Ridge, Agnes Maule Machar’s De Profundis, Louise Morey Bowman’s The White Garden, Virna Sheard’s The Young Knight, Frederick George Scott’s The Silent Toast, Arthur Stringer’s Christmas Bells in War Time, Archibald Sullivan’s The Plaint of the Children, Beatrice Redpath’s The Men of Canada, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s The Mother Gives, John Stuart Thomson’s His Darkest Hour, A. E. S. Smythe’s noble sonnet The Champions, S. Morgan-Powell’s magniloquent Kitchener’s Work, and W. D. Lighthall’s magnificent and exalting poem The Galahads.
One of the finest commemorative poems of the world war written by a Canadian is Duncan Campbell Scott’s sonnet To a Canadian Lad Killed in the War. It is fine in conception, novel in terminal endings and elevating in emotional appeal. But fine as it is, it pales in aesthetic and artistic dignity with the only Canadian war poem that has achieved sublimity—the same poet’s unforgettably noble elegiacs To a Canadian Aviator (Who Died for His Country in France):—
Tossed like a falcon from the hunter’s wrist
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.
Peril below thee and above, peril
Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt
Thy peerless heart; gathering wing and poise,