DEMOCRITUS
Joy of your opulent atoms! wouldst thou dare
Say that Thought also of atoms self-became,
Waving to soul as light had the eye in aim;
And so with things of bodily sense compare
Those native notions that the heavens declare,
Space and Time, Beauty and God—Praise we his name!—
Real ideas, that on tongues of flame
From out mind’s cooling paste leapt unaware?
Thy spirit, Democritus, orb’d in the eterne
Illimitable galaxy of night
Shineth undimm’d where greater splendours burn
Of sage and poet: by their influence bright
We are held; and pouring from his quenchless urn
Christ with immortal love-beams laves the height.
NOTES
[Poem 3.]—As the metre or scansion of this poem was publicly discussed and wrongly analysed by some who admired its effects, it may be well to explain that it and the three other poems in similar measure, “Flowering Tree,” “In der Fremde,” “The West Front,” are strictly syllabic verse on the model left by Milton in “Samson Agonistes”; except that his system, which depended on exclusion of extra-metrical syllables (that is, syllables which did not admit of resolution by “elision” into a disyllabic scheme) from all places but the last, still admitted them in that place, thereby forbidding inversion of the last foot. It is natural to conclude that, had he pursued his inventions, his next step would have been to get rid of this anomaly; and if that is done, the result is the new rhythms that these poems exhibit. In this sort of prosody rhyme is admitted, like alliteration, as an ornament at will; it is not needed. My four experiments are confined to the twelve-syllable verse. It is probably agreed that there are possibilities in that long six-foot line which English poetry has not fully explored.
[Poem 12], “Hell and Hate.”—This poem was written December 16, 1913. It is the description of a little picture hanging in my bedroom; it had been painted for me as a New Year’s gift more than thirty years before, and I described it partly because I never exactly knew what it meant. When the war broke out I remembered my poem and sent it to The Times, where it appeared in the Literary Supplement September 24, 1914.
Poem 13, “Wake up, England!”—This motto is the King’s well-known call to the country in 1901 at the Guildhall.
The verses appeared in The Times on August 8, 1914. There were three other stanzas, which are better omitted; and the last two lines, which were printed in capitals and ran thus,
England stands for honour,
May God defend the right,