With screams, and with a wild audacity
Dare all the battle danger of thy flight;
Till weary with combat one shall desert the light,
Fall like a bolt of thunder and check his fall
On the high ledge, smoky with mist and cloud,
Where his neglected eaglets shriek aloud,
And drawing the film across his sovereign sight
Shall dream of thy swift soul immortal
Mounting in circles, faithful beyond death.
In that poem we perceive, unmistakably, how even war verse may rise to the spiritual dignity of absolute poetry, and by its ideal substance and spiritual grandeur achieve the highest moral and religious function—the function, namely, of dignifying or glorifying the human spirit with Christlikeness in self-slaying love for the perfection and happiness of humanity. Only a too fastidious and perverted criticism will deny to the best of the Canadian poetry of the World War a distinction in truth, beauty, and splendor of ideas and in technical artistry that gives it the right to an equal place beside the significant war verse of the British and United States poets. Certainly in technique it is quite as finished as the American war poetry, and in ideas of ‘uncompelled and undiluted chivalry,’ it is as noble and eloquent as the war poetry of the British singers.