Between the midnight pillars of black elms
The old moon hangs, a thin, cold, amber flame
Over low ghostly mist: a lone snipe wheels
Through shadowy moonshine, droning; and there steals
Into my heart a fear without a name
Out of primæval night's resurgent realms,
Unearthly terror, chilling me with dread
As I lie waking wide-eyed on the bed.
And then you turn towards me in your sleep
Murmuring, and with a sigh of deep content
You nestle to my breast and over me
Steals the warm peace of you; and, all fear spent,
I hold you to me sleeping quietly,
Till I, too, sink in slumber sound and deep.
* * * * * * * *
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED.
By Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
BATTLE. Crown 8vo. 1s. net. [Third Thousand]
Some Extracts from early Press Notices
"With the exception of Rupert Brooke's five sonnets, '1914,' 'Battle' contains, we think, the only English poems about the war--so far--for which anyone would venture to predict a future on their own merits."--The Athenæum.
"Among the many books which the war has drawn forth it may safely be said that none contains more concentrated poignancy than the tiny pamphlet of verses which Mr. Gibson entitles 'Battle.' Sympathy and irony strive for the palm throughout. The little book is a monument to the wantonness of it all, to the cheapness of life in war, the carelessness as to the individual, the disregard alike of promise and performance, the elimination of personality. When war is declared, said Napoleon, there are no longer men, there is only a man. Napoleon spoke for the clear-sighted general in command; Mr. Gibson speaks for the perplexed soldier under orders, and, doing so, illustrates the other side of the medal. In war, he says, in effect, there are no longer men, there is no longer man, there are only sports of chance, pullers of triggers, bewildered fulfillers of instructions, cynical acceptors of destiny."--The Times.
"Each separate vision, though realised in the particular case, has universal range--that is where the greatness of the art lies."--GERALD GOULD in The Herald.
"They are extremely objective; a series of short dramatic lyrics, written with the simplicity and directness which Mr. Gibson chiefly studies in his exceptional art, expressing, without any implied comment, but with profoundly implied emotion, the feelings, thoughts, sensations of soldiers in the midst of the actual experiences of modern warfare. The emotion they imply is not patriotic, but simply and broadly human; this is what war means, we feel; these exquisite bodies insulted by agony and death, these incalculable spirits devastated. What all this destruction is for is taken for granted. Modern warfare is not beautiful, and Mr. Gibson does not try to gloss it in the usual way, by underlining the heroism and endurance it evokes. All that is simply assumed in these poems, just as the common soldier himself assumes it. An almost appalling heroism is unemphatically revealed in them as the fundamental fact of usual human nature. This is the ground-bass, and above its constancy plays the ever-varying truth of what fighting means to some individual piece of human nature. The poems are moments isolated and fixed out of the infinite changing flux of human reaction to the terrible galvanism of war. But that thrilling galvanism does not alter human kind; and sometimes Mr. Gibson forces us to realise the vast unreason of war by bringing into withering contact with its current a mind still preoccupied with the habits of peace."--MR. LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE in The Quarterly Review.