“SO HE PASSED OVER.”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1751, 13 November 1917, Page 4

“SO HE PASSED OVER.”

MANY VIEWS OF DEATH. (London Express). Before the war it was commonly regarded as bad taste to talk of death unless one were a poet. Today, as Mr Manning Foster says in the introduction to his little anthology, “Blessed are the Dead,” (Cope and Fenwick, 3s) “much of the language of poets has passed into the prose of our lives.” Death has become too persistent to be ignored. We are compelled to look it in the face and to consider what it is. Mr Manning Foster is electric. He quotes from ancient philosophers and modern novelists. His anthology includes many points of view, though in all the quotations there is the same contention that death, whatever it may imply, is never to be feared. It may not, perhaps, be welcomed, but it must be met almost with indifference. This is simply expressed in the letter of a young soldier written on the day before he was killed: — “I have been looking at the stars and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of forty years of life is compared with them! It seems scarcely worth talking aoout.” This detachment from the merely personal is certainly rare. The individual life must generally be of supreme concern to the individual. The great truth is that as a man lives so will he die. To the adventurous death is an awfully fine adventure. Walt Whitman, for example, revelled in life. Yet the thought of death thrilled him:— And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results, And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death. Joy, shipmate, joy! (Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry), Our life is closed, our life begins, The long, long anchorage we leave, The ship is clear at last, she leaps! Here there is the joy that comes with the new beginning. Similar splendour is found in the assertion in the “Pilgrim’s Progress”: “So he passed over. And all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.” When the beauty of life has been ever apparent, the beauty of death overshadows everything else. “The setting sun r and music at the close.” To Blake —to quote another instance —life was a constant mystery, and for him “the door of death, is made of gold.” As Thomas A. Kempis says: “Life’s evening will take its character from the day that has preceded it.” The patriot is exalted by the thought that death doubly unites him to his motherland. We find this exaltation in Rupert Brook’s well-known lines: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave one her flowers to love, her ways to roam, To most of the writers quoted by Mr Manning Foster, death is rest and respite from life. To them life is not an adventure, but a wearisome unreality; as the Talmud says, “the shadow of a bird ip its flight.” Christian Rosetti voices this mood in her lines: — Rest, rest for evermore Upon a mossy shore Till time shall cease. Death becomes “ a celestial holiday,” “a Verdant garden of repose,” “tho place whence soreheartedness and sorrow and sighing have fled away.” For us all death must be life’s explanation and its justification. Browning has written the last word: You never know what life means till you die; : Ever through life it’s death that makes life live, Gives it whatever the significance.