Poems, 1914-1919. Baring Maurice

      The wind had blown away the rain

      That all day long had soaked the level plain.

      Against the horizon’s fiery wrack,

      The sheds loomed black.

      And higher, in their tumultuous concourse met,

      The streaming clouds, shot-riddled banners, wet

      With the flickering storm,

      Drifted and smouldered, warm

      With flashes sent

      From the lower firmament.

      And they concealed —

      They only here and there through rifts revealed

      A hidden sanctuary of fire and light,

      A city of chrysolite.

      We looked and laughed and wondered, and I said:

      That orange sea, those oriflammes outspread

      Were like the fanciful imaginings

      That the young painter flings

      Upon the canvas bold,

      Such as the sage and the old

      Make mock at, saying it could never be

      And you assented also, laughingly.

      I wondered what they meant,

      That flaming firmament,

      Those clouds so grey so gold, so wet so warm,

      So much of glory and so much of storm,

      The end of the world, or the end

      Of the war – remoter still to me and you, my friend.

      Alas! it meant not this, it meant not that:

      It meant that now the last time you and I

      Should look at the golden sky,

      And the dark fields large and flat,

      And smell the evening weather,

      And laugh and talk and wonder both together.

      The last, last time. We nevermore should meet

      In France or London street,

      Or fields of home. The desolated space

      Of life shall nevermore

      Be what it was before.

      No one shall take your place.

      No other face

      Can fill that empty frame.

      There is no answer when we call your name.

      We cannot hear your step upon the stair.

      We turn to speak and find a vacant chair.

      Something is broken which we cannot mend.

      God has done more than take away a friend

      In taking you; for all that we have left

      Is bruised and irremediably bereft.

      There is none like you. Yet not that alone

      Do we bemoan;

      But this; that you were greater than the rest,

      And better than the best.

      O liberal heart fast-rooted to the soil,

      O lover of ancient freedom and proud toil,

      Friend of the gipsies and all wandering song,

      The forest’s nursling and the favoured child

      Of woodlands wild —

      O brother to the birds and all things free,

      Captain of liberty!

      Deep in your heart the restless seed was sown;

      The vagrant spirit fretted in your feet;

      We wondered could you tarry long,

      And brook for long the cramping street,

      Or would you one day sail for shores unknown,

      And shake from you the dust of towns, and spurn

      The crowded market-place – and not return?

      You found a sterner guide;

      You heard the guns. Then, to their distant fire,

      Your dreams were laid aside;

      And on that day, you cast your heart’s desire

      Upon a burning pyre;

      You gave your service to the exalted need,

      Until at last from bondage freed,

      At liberty to serve as you loved best,

      You chose the noblest way. God did the rest.

      So when the spring of the world shall shrive our stain,

      After the winter of war,

      When the poor world awakes to peace once more,

      After such night of ravage and of rain,

      You shall not come again.

      You shall not come to taste the old Spring weather,

      To gallop through the soft untrampled heather,

      To bathe and bake your body on the grass.

      We shall be there, alas!

      But not with you. When Spring shall wake the earth,

      And quicken the scarred fields to the new birth,

      Our grief shall grow. For what can Spring renew

      More fiercely for us than the need of you?

      That night I dreamt they sent for me and said

      That you were missing, “missing, missing – dead”:

      I cried when in the morning I awoke,

      And all the world seemed shrouded in a cloak;

      But when I saw the sun,

      And knew another day had just begun,

      I brushed the dream away, and quite forgot

      The nightmare’s ugly blot.

      So was the dream forgot. The dream came true.

      Before the night I knew

      That you had flown away into the air

      Forever. Then I cheated my despair.

      I said

      That you were safe – or wounded – but not dead.

      Alas! I knew

      Which was the false and true.

      And after days of watching, days of lead,

      There came the certain news that you were dead

      You had died fighting, fighting against odds,

      Such as in war the gods

      Æthereal dared when all the world was young;

      Such fighting as blind Homer never sung,

      Nor Hector nor Achilles never knew;

      High in the empty blue.

      High, high, above the clouds, against the setting sun,

      The fight was fought, and your great task was done.

      Of all your brave adventures this the last

      The bravest was and best;

      Meet ending