The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IN INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, JANUARY 14, 1915. THE POEM OF HATE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 11, 14 January 1915, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IN INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, JANUARY 14, 1915. THE POEM OF HATE.

Discussing the literature of the war, and that about to .form in its wake, the Lyttelton Times remarks that the few months that have gone on the road to Armageddon" have produced one poem "which stands out like the Laocoon amongst sculptures, every line, every phrase * separate convulsion." This is the "Poem of Hate" written some three months ago by' an unknown German, Ernst Lissauer, published, of all places, m a Munich magazine purporting to cater lor youth, and translated by the wife or daughter of Profess* Henderson, of North Carolina. Ihe 'limes' writer goes on to say: we all know that this new devil-hymn of the Neo-Hun or the Western Afghan, if we like that term better, has .become the "Marseillaise" of the German trenches, the "Lillibulero ot German nationalism for the time being And the satanic malignity of it might well strike with artistic envy a people like the Afghans, whose boast it was that Lucifer fell out of heaven into their country and became the special patron of the soil. Ihe average reader sees in Lissauer s molten verses a nasty nightmare of Anglophobia. Professor Henderson hears in the changing lines "the dissonant note of ancient tribal rites. This brings the matter fairly close to the view of the literary folk-lorist, who reads into this volcanic battle-chant -, good deal more than meets the eve. I„ a word, the "Poem of Hate" and Tennyson's "flower of the crannied wall," are diverse epitomes of cosmic'truth. Anyone who has a cleai notion why the German uhlan sings the "Poem of Hate" and the Bnt.sh Tommy sings "It's a Long Way to Tippeniry" has a working knowledge of the whole psychology of the most tremendous war in history. It is conceded on all sides that folk song cannot live in cultured soil any more than the Maori onion or the snowberry can spring up in the wake of the plough. It requires more than an atmosphere of blood and broil; it requires the distinct psychological environment that accepts blood and broil, charms and spells, nower-loye and moon-love, as essential factors in life. There is, indeed, nothing of Slower or moon-love, nothing of Hallowe'en or May day in the Prussian attitude of mind responsible at once . for this poem and this war. But i there is a mediaeval, a neolithic character in the Prussianised tem- , peramejit of the forty-three-year-old Empire that has spent its time living for "Dor Tug." This element breaks •across the ultra-scientific Mirfnee oi modern Germany, the surface that

displaced tlio kindly Tcutonis.ni of old days which gave us Grimm's Kairy Tales, the "Lorelei" and the "Christmas Tree." The two temperaments are alike only in this, that they are out of tune with the working realities of their time. A hundred years ago a Konier could write that matchless cry of militant faith, "The Prayer on the Battlefield." To-day a Lissauer can only write the "Poem of Hate." But that is nearer to the form and fire of folk soiik than anything civilised Europe can produce in the twentieth century. No country should be able to crown itself with such a war-song to-day. As litterateurs we may feel shame of the uninventive lyricism that can only express itself in "Tipperary" and parodies of "John Peel" and "Marching Through Georgia." But the historian knows that, for good and ill, we have passed the folk song stage. We can do some powerful rhymed invective still, as readers of William Watson's "Funeral March of Wilhelm TT.," in the "Nineteenth Century," can testify. Mr Watson's forte is invective, as we; gratefully remember in re-reading "The Purple East" and "The Year of Shame." But it is not folk song—is, indeed, at the antipodes of folk song. The ability to write the "Poem of Hate" goes with the ability to stalk a whole group of nations for over a generation, like a Thug stalking his victim. It goes with the inability to find one's heat in the great orchestra of twentieth century civilisation. In a word, a nation which can write folk song now is either rising rapidly, like the young Greeks with their songs of the Klephts, or has declined proportionately from the right intuitiveness of its age. That Britain can do no hoEter than "Tipperary" for the trenches is really more to her credit than the supreme Gilhertian virtue of not being "a sian, a Prussian or an Ey-tal.ian," which we all chanted a generation