The Silk-Hat Soldier | Page 3

that God may hear the prayer.?So it may come about next Christmas Day?That we shall hear the happy children play?Gladly aloud, unmindful of the dead,?And watch the lovers go?To the old woods to find the mistletoe.?But this year, children, if you needs must play,?Play very softly, underneath your breath;?Be happy softly, lovers, for great Death?Makes England holy with sorrow this Christmas Day;?Yes! in the old woods leave the mistletoe,?And leave the holly for another year--?Its berries are too red.
[Christmas, 1899--Written during the Boer War.]
"SOLDIER GOING TO THE WAR"
Soldier going to the war--?Will you take my heart with you,?So that I may share a little?In the famous things you do?
Soldier going to the war--?If in battle you must fall,?Will you, among all the faces,?See my face the last of all?
Soldier coming from the war--?Who shall bind your sunburnt brow?With the laurel of the hero,?Soldier, soldier--vow for vow!
Soldier coming from the war--?When the street is one wide sea,?Flags and streaming eyes and glory--?Soldier, will you look for me?
THE RAINBOW
"These things are real," said one, and bade me gaze?On black and mighty shapes of iron and stone,?On murder, on madness, on lust, on towns ablaze,?And on a thing made all of rattling bone:?"What," said he, "will you bring to match with these?"?"Yea! War is real," I said, "and real is Death,?A little while--mortal realities;?But Love and Hope draw an immortal breath."
Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day,?With funeral blackness and with leaping fire?And boiling roar of rain, more real than they?That, when the warring heavens begin to tire,?With tender fingers on the tumult paint;?Spanning the huddled wrack from base to cope?With soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,--?The rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope.
Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams:?Ere man yet was, 'twas hope that wrought him man;?The blind earth, climbing skyward by her gleams,?Hoped--and the beauty of the world began.?Prophetic of all loveliness to be,?Though God Himself seem from His station hurled,?Still shall the blackest hell look up and see?Hope's rainbow on the summits of the world.
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