NOT WITH VAIN TEARS
NOT with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,
We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty highroads of the aimless dead,
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered byway of the air,
Some low, sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find
Some whispering, ghost-forgotten nook, and there
Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
All of Rupert Brooke’s work has been collected and issued, a rich though slender sheaf. The book is fervently commended to people whose own souls are in the key that responds to notes so spiritually fine and clear as those he sounds in all his lines.
“But a Short Time to Live” was written by Serg’t Leslie Coulson, whose “little hour” came to an end at Arras, in France, October 7, 1916:
BUT A SHORT TIME TO LIVE
OUR little hour—how swift it flies—
When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies,
Leaving us but a little while
To dream our dreams, to sing our song,
To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower.
The gods—they do not give us long—
One little hour.
* * * * *
Our little hour—how soon it dies;
How short a time to tell our beads,
To chant our feeble litanies,
To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds.
The altar lights grow pale and dim,
The bells hang silent in the tower—
So passes with the dying hymn
Our little hour.
These songs, with others that have lilted so bravely, so gravely, through the world’s most bitter years of travail, will live long in literature, with many more as strong or as sweet. Had all the writers lived, we would have had a wealth of splendid gifts from them, especially, maybe, from that “poor bird-hearted singer of a day,” Francis Ledwidge, who fell in battle in Flanders, July 31, 1917. Ledwidge was discovered by Lord Dunsany, himself a soldier-poet and a patron of poets. He was lance corporal in Lord Dunsany’s company in the 5th Battalion of the Royal Inniskillen Fusileers. He wrote quite touchingly to a friend shortly before the end, “I mean to do something great if I am spared, but out here one may at any moment be hurled out of life.” There is no doubt he would have done “something great,” for here is a swan song not unworthy to bear his name to later times:
THE LOST ONES
SOMEWHERE is music from the linnets’ bills,
And through the sunny flowers the bee wings drone,
And white bells of convolvulus on hills
Of quiet May make silent ringing blown
Hither and thither by the wind of showers,
And somewhere all the wandering birds have flown;
And the brown breath of Autumn chills the flowers.
But where are all the loves of long ago?
O little twilight ship blown up the tide,
Where are the faces laughing in the glow
Of morning years, the lost ones scattered wide?
Give me your hand, O brother; let us go
Crying about the dark for those who died.