Miscellany of Poetry | Page 7

and cry again--
"O lord of Battle, why
Should we
alone be sane?"
We stifle cries with lightless eyes
And face eternal night;
We stifle
cries to sacrifice
Our eyes for Human Sight.
And many give that
men may live,
A life, a limb, a brain,
That fellow men may
understand
And be for ever sane.
What matter if we lose a hand
If
others wander hand in hand;
Or lose a foot if others greet
The dawn
of peace with dancing feet;
What matter if we die unheard

If others
hear the Poet's Word?
Because we pay from day to day
The price of sacrifice;
Because we
face each dreary place
Again, again, again.
Lord, set us free from
Sanity--
Who feel no fighting thrill;
Must we remain for ever sane

And never learn to kill?
No answer came. In very shame
Our

long-unheeded cry
Grew bitterly more bitterly,
"O why, O why, O
why.
May we not feel the lust of steel
The fury-woken thrill--
For
men may learn to live and die
And never learn to kill?"
October, 1918
SHE TO HIM
The day you died, my Share of All
My soul was tossed
Hither and
thither, like a leaf,
And lost, lost, lost,
From sounds and sight,

Beneath the night
Of gloom and grief.
But--
(Hush, for the wind may hear)
Soon, soon you came in
solitude:
And we renewed
All happiness.
Now, who shall guess

How close we are, my dear?
(Hush, for the wind may hear.)
Yet--
Other women wait
Their doors ajar;
And listen, listen, listen,

For the gate,
And murmur, "Soon, the war
Will seem a far,

Dim agony of sleep."
May I be joyful, too,
That day,
For love of you
May I not turn
away
Nor--weep.

JOHN DRINKWATER
MALEDICTION
Thrush, across the twilight
Here in the abbey close,
Pouring from
your lilac-bough
Note on pebbled note,
Why do you sing so,

Making your song so bright.
Swelling to a throbbing curve
That
brave little throat?
Soon, but a season brief,
The lice among your feathers,

Stiff-winged and aimless-eyed,

With song dead you shall fall;


Refuse of some clotted ditch,
Seeking no more berries;
Why with
lyric numbers now
Do you the twilight call?
Proud in your tawny plumes
Mottled in devising,
Singing as though
never sang
Bird in close till now--
Sharp are the javelins
Of death
that are seeking,
Seeking even simple birds
On a lilac-bough.
Crushed, forlorn, a frozen thing,
For no more nesting,
For no more
speckled eggs
In pattered cup of clay,--
Soon your song shall come
to this
You who make the twilight yours,
And echoes of the abbey,

At the end of day.
In the song I hear it,
The thud of a poor feathered death,
In the
swelling throat I see
The splintering of song--
What demon then has
worked in me
To tease my brain to bitterness--
In me who have
loved bird and tree
So long, so long?
Until I come to charity,
Until I find peace again,
My curse upon the
fiend or god
That will not let me hear
A bird in song upon the
bough
But, hovering about the notes,
There chimes the maniac
beating
Of black-winged fear.
SPECTRAL
What will the years tell?
Hush! If it would but speak--
That shadow
athwart the stream,
In the gloom of a dream;
Could my brain but spell
The thought in the brain of that weak
Old
ghost that hides in the gloom,
Over there, of the chestnut bloom.
I sit in the broad June light
On the open bank of the river,
In the
summer of manhood, young;
And over the water bright
Is a lair that
is overhung
With coned pink blooms that quiver
And droop, till the
water's breast
Is of petal and leaf caressed.

And the June sky glares on my prime--
But there in the gloom, with
Time,
Huddled, with Time on its back,
Is a shadow that is my
wrack.
Yes, it is I in the lair,
Peering and watching me there.
Under the chestnut bloom
My old age hides in the gloom.
And the
years to be have been,
Could I spell the lore of that brain.
But the
river flows between,
Over the weeds of pain,
Over the snares of
death,
Maybe, should I leap to hold,
With myself grown old,

Council there in the gloom
Under the chestnut bloom.
And so, with instruction none,
I go, and leave it there,
My ghost
with Time in its lair,
And the things that must yet be done
Tear at
my heart unknown,
And the years have tongues of stone
With no
syllable to make
For consolation's sake.
But peradventure yet
I shall return
To dare the weeds of death,

And plunge through the coned pink bloom,
And cry on that spectre
set
In its silent ring of gloom,
And stay my youth to learn
The
thing that my old age saith.

WILFRED WILSON GIBSON
IN WAR TIME
1
TROOPSHIP, (s.s. Baltic: Mid-Atlantic: July, 1917)
Dark waters into crystalline brilliance break
About the keel, as
through the moonless night
The dark ship moves in its own moving
lake
Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light;
And to the clear
horizon, all around
Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright
As
though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white,
A million moons in
the dark green waters drowned.

And staring at the magic with eyes adream,
That never till now have
looked upon the sea,
Boys from the Middle-West lounge listlessly

In the unlanterned darkness, boys who go
Beckoned by some
unchallengeable gleam
To unknown lands to fight an unknown foe.
2
THE CONSCRIPT.
Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all