The Vision Splendid.
"If God be with you, who can be against you?" is the echo that we hear going and coming behind these great Christian lines. Indeed, behind every poem that Oxenham writes we can hear the echoes of some great scriptural word of promise, or hope or faith or courage. The Christian, as well as those who never saw the Bible or a church, will feel at home with this poet anywhere. The advantage that the Christian will have in reading him is that he will understand him better.
Turning to those who stay at home and have lost loved ones, with what sympathy and deep, tender understanding does he write in "To You Who Have Lost." You may almost see a great kindly father standing by your side, his warm hand in yours as he sings:
"I know! I know!—
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe—
The pang of loss—
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross.
'Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken,… Oh, my son I my son!'"
"Yea—think of this!—
Yea, rather think on this!—
He died as few men get the chance to die—
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and Right, and Liberty—
And such a death is Immortality."
All's Well.
If those who have lost loved ones "Over There" cannot be buoyed by that, I know not what will buoy them, what will comfort.
Oxenham too gives us a picture of a battlefield where birds sing and roses bloom, just as do Service and several other poets who have been in the midst of the conflict. We have become familiar with this picture, but no writer yet has caught its full, eternal meaning and pressed it down into three lines for the world as has this man; in "Here, There, and Everywhere":
"Man proposes—God disposes;
Yet our hope in Him reposes
Who in war-time still makes roses."
The Fiery Cross.