VOICES THAT ARE STILL

Evening Star, Issue 20053, 19 December 1928, Page 9

VOICES THAT ARE STILL

POETS WHO FELL IN THE WAR Armistice Day provided “ K. 5.,” ir the Melbourne ‘ Age,’ with an opportunity of hearing again the messages that the beloved deceased, who were dreamers on earth, as well as men of action, have bequeathed us. Those “are they, he wrote, who have “ outsoared the shadow of our night, envy and hate and calumny and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight”; the men who made the England of war a nest of singing birds. These poets were no idle singers of an empty day. The pity is'that their lutes are for over silent.

Those wo recall are like Lycidas, dead in their prime, but they are mighty in their deep sleep, and will be remembered as the choristers who kept the Empire singing in the days of her travail. They diced merrily with Death; but they sang the songs eloquently. Leslie Coulson was a young London journalist who was forging ahead in Fleet street when the call camo to join the great emprise. He sang with liery indignation early in the war:

Who made the law that Death should stalk the village? Who gave it forth to kill among the sheaves ? Who spake the word that Death should stalk the hedgerows? Who flung the dead among the fallen loaves? Who made the law? But fighting could not blot out the days of peace which are our heritage, and we find Coulson singing; When I come home and leave behind Strange things I would not call to mind, I’ll taste good ale and home-made bread, And see white sheets and pillows spread; And there is one who’ll softly creep To kiss mo ere I fall asleep, And I shall be a hoy again When I come home! There was romance enough in the war for a world of poets, as there was a variety of ways of singing the glories of a living death under Mars. Hear H, C. Sorley—dead at twenty—who wrote: So sing with joyful breath, For why, you are going to death! Teeming earth will surely store All the gladness that you pour. All these youngsters—for they were all youngsters when death plucked them by the sleeve—knew not only what is meant by the beauty of sacrifice, hut could see also the “uplift” in a world tragedy. The idea is thus expressed by J. W. Street:

'Die soul of life is in the will to give Tho best ol life, a willing sacrifice; Youth only reaches greatness when he dies In fullest praise that love and truth might live. Much the same idea, comes from Vincent Morris, a lad of eighteen, who indited: Then if I live no man can say, think 1, He lives because be did not dare to die 1 The spirit of defiance was a common thing in those dark days of strife. Tho homely note is struck by It. K. Vernedo in tho following lines to his wife, and they are an echo of the good old cavalier days when knights were bold, yet the verses were in reality a sad, unconscious farewell: Little you’d care what I laid at your feet, Ribbon or crest or shawl ; What if I bring yon nothing sweet? Nor maybe come home at all ? Ah! but you’ll know, bravo heart, you’ll know Two things I’ve kept to send— My honour, for which you bade me go, And my love, my love, to tho end. Eric Fitzwalter Wilkinson, with something of a prophetic soul, wrote to his people just prior to the action in which he fell : . . . I have been For months of an excited life a king. Peer for these months of those whoso graves are green, Where’er tho borders of the Empire fling Their mighty arms. For chivalry there is no need to look beyond the lines of Alec Robertson, who wrote after finding a wallet and letters on the corpse of a foo:

They wore not meant for our too curious eyes Or our imagination to surmise. From which they tell much that they left untold; Strangers and foemcn we, yet wo bohold, Sad and subdued, thy solace and thy cheer.

There is a reminder of Noyes and Maurice in those lines. Walter Wilkinson thinks of the attitude of tho dead in relation to the days of peace:

Brothers, I beg you. be at rest. Bo quite at rest for England’s sake; The flowerful hours in England now Sing low your sleep to English ears. And would you have your sorrow wake The heart to further tears? Nayl bo at rest, her loyal dead; Sleep! vex her not!

No poet has sung more exultantly ol the rich dead than Rupert Brooke, and in this sestet he has delineated what we all devoutly wish as the result of their sacrifice: Blow, hugles, blow! They brought us for our dearth. Holiness lacked so long and love and pain; Honour lias come back as a king to earth And paid his subjects with a royal wage. And nobleness walks in onr ways again And wo have come into our heritage. Yet there is a finer thing even than this in another famous sonnet: And think, this heart ail evil shod away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less, Gives somewhere back tho thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day, „ , . , , j And laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness ~ . , In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. Francis Lodwidgc, tho Irish scavenger, who was discovered by Lord Dunsany, served in Egypt, Gallipoli, and France, and never wrote a war Bong I His verso was wholly on tho lanes of native Ireland, and tho song of the blackbird was his haunting passion. He wrote to Dunsauy: “ I have taken up arms for the fields along the Boyne, for tho birds and the blue sky over them.” Hero is his apostrophe to Ireland ; God made ray mother on an April dajr, From sorrow and the mists along the sea. Lost birds’ and wanderers’ songs, and ; ocean spray. And the moon loved her, wandering jealously. In only ono of his poems is there a hint of the bestiality of carnage, rani this piece concludes with this strangled exclamation: s But it is lovely now in winter long, And God, to hear the blackbird sing once morel Finally, Richard Dennys sang for what wo all yearn—a newborn earth, clean and sweet and courageous after desolation and devastation; Ourselves, we see the light, and know it wise (Seek not, 0 faint of heart, our hand to stay !) That, Phcemx-like, a nobler world may rise From out tho ashes of a dead to-dffiy. Quotation and selection must have an end. There are scores of other dead soldier poets to be recalled. It is only ton years since the armistice was signed, and it null be a calamity if* these soldier poets are to b« negleqblfi ) altar, a .weary j