The falling rain is music overhead,
The dark night, lit by no Intruding star,
Fit covering yields to thoughts that roam afar
And turn again familiar paths to tread,
Where many a laden hour too quickly sped
In happier times, before the dawn of war,
Before the spoiler had whet his sword to mar
The faithful living and the mighty dead.
It is not that my soul is weighed with woe,
But rather wonder, seeing they do but sleep.
As birds that in the sinking summer sweep
Across the heaven to happier climes to go,
So they are gone; and sometimes we must weep,
And sometimes, smiling, murmur, "Be it so!"
Henry William Hutchinson
THE MESSINES ROAD
I
The road that runs up to Messines
Is double-locked with gates of fire,
Barred with high ramparts, and between
The unbridged river, and the wire.
None ever goes up to Messines,
For Death lurks all about the town,
Death holds the vale as his demesne,
And only Death moves up and down.
II
Choked with wild weeds, and overgrown
With rank grass, all torn and rent
By war's opposing engines, strewn
With débris from each day's event!
And in the dark the broken trees,
Whose arching boughs were once its shade,
Grim and distorted, ghostly ease
In groans their souls vexed and afraid.