And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,
Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,
Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam
Most individual and bewildering ghost!
And turn, and toss your brown delightful head
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.

THE GREAT LOVER 1

I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,

And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,
My night shall be remembered for a star

That outshone all the suns of all men's days.
Shall I not crown them with immortal praise

Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me
High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see

The inenarrable 2 godhead of delight?

Love is a flame;

we have beaconed the world's night.

A city: and we have built it, these and I.

An emperor: we have taught the world to die.
So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence,
And the high cause of Love's magnificence,
And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names
Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames,

And set them as a banner, that men may know,

To dare the generations, burn, and blow

Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming.

1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 1915, by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission.

2 Indescribable.

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such-
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns.

Dear names,
And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames;
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing:
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass.
Whatever passes not, in the great hour,

Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power
To hold them with me through the gate of Death.
They'll play deserter, turn with traitor breath,
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust
And sacramented covenant to the dust.

Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what's left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers.

But the best I've known,

Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.

Nothing remains.

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed
Praise you,

"All these were lovely "; say, "He loved."

THE SOLDIER

If I should die, think only this of me;

1

That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

JOSEPH PLUNKETT

Joseph Plunkett was born in Ireland in 1887 and devoted himself to the cause that has compelled so many martyrs. He gave all his hours and finally his life in an effort to establish the freedom of 1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 1915, by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission.

his country. He was one of the leaders of that group of Nationalists which included MacDonagh and Padraic Pearse.

After the Easter Week uprising in Dublin in 1916, Plunkett and his compatriots were arrested by the British Government and executed.

I SEE HIS BLOOD UPON THE ROSE

I see His blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of His eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

I see His face in every flower;

The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but His voice - and carven by His power,
Rocks are His written words.

All pathways by His feet are worn,

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.

F. W. HARVEY

Frederick William Harvey, born in Gloucestershire in 1888, was a lance-corporal in the English army and was in the German prison camp at Gütersloh when he wrote The Bugler, one of the isolated great poems written during the war. Much of his other verse is haphazard and journalistic, although Gloucestershire Friends (1917) contains several lines that glow with the colors of poetry.

THE BUGLER

God dreamed a man;

Then, having firmly shut

Life like a precious metal in his fist
Withdrew, His labour done. Thus did begin
Our various divinity and sin.

For some to ploughshares did the metal twist,
And others dreaming empires- straightway cut
Crowns for their aching foreheads. Others beat
Long nails and heavy hammers for the feet
Of their forgotten Lord. (Who dares to boast
That he is guiltless?) Others coined it: most
Did with it simply nothing. (Here again
Who cries his innocence?) Yet doth remain
Metal unmarred, to each man more or less,
Whereof to fashion perfect loveliness.

For me, I do but bear within my hand
(For sake of Him our Lord, now long forsaken)
A simple bugle such as may awaken

With one high morning note a drowsing man:
That wheresoe'er within my motherland

That sound may come, 'twill echo far and wide
Like pipes of battle calling up a clan,
Trumpeting men through beauty to God's side.

T. P. CAMERON WILSON

"Tony" P. Cameron Wilson was born in South Devon in 1889 and was educated at Exeter and Oxford. He wrote one novel besides several articles under the pseudonym Tipuca, a euphonic combination of the first three initials of his name. Magpies in Picardy, a posthumous collection, appeared in 1919.

When the war broke out he was a teacher in a school at Hindhead, Surrey; and, after many months of gruelling conflict, he was given a captaincy. He was killed in action by a machine-gun bullet March 23, 1918, at the age of twenty-nine.

SPORTSMEN IN PARADISE

They left the fury of the fight,
And they were very tired.

The gates of Heaven were open quite,
Unguarded and unwired.