No More Learning

Drink to them--amorous of dear Earth as well,
They asked no tribute lovelier than this--
And in the wine that ripened where they fell,
Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss.

_Alan Seeger_

_Champagne, France_,

_July, 1915_




HEADQUARTERS


A league and a league from the trenches--from the traversed
maze of the lines,
Where daylong the sniper watches and daylong the bullet whines,
And the cratered earth is in travail with mines and with
countermines--
Here, where haply some woman dreamed (are those
her roses that bloom
In the garden beyond the windows of my littered
working room? )
We have decked the map for our masters as a bride is
decked for the groom.

Fair, on each lettered numbered square--crossroad
and mound and wire,
Loophole, redoubt, and emplacement--lie the targets
their mouths desire;
Gay with purples and browns and blues, have we
traced them their arcs of fire.

And ever the type-keys chatter; and ever our keen
wires bring
Word from the watchers a-crouch below, word from
the watchers a-wing:
And ever we hear the distant growl of our hid 'guns
thundering.

Hear it hardly, and turn again to our maps, where the
trench lines crawl,
Red on the gray and each with a sign for the ranging
shrapnel's fall--
Snakes that our masters shall scotch at dawn, as is
written here on the wall.

For the weeks of our waiting draw to a close. . . .
There is scarcely a leaf astir
In the garden beyond my windows, where the twilight
shadows blur
The blaze of some woman's roses. . . . "Bombardment
orders, sir.
"

_Gilbert Frankau_




HOME THOUGHTS FROM LAVENTIE


Green gardens in Laventie!
Soldiers only know the street
Where the mud is churned and splashed about
By battle-wending feet;
And yet beside one stricken house there is a glimpse of grass--
Look for it when you pass.

Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick,
Two roofless ruins stand;
And here, among the wreckage, where the back-wall should have been,
We found a garden green.

The grass was never trodden on,
The little path of gravel
Was overgrown with celandine;
No other folk did travel
Along its weedy surface but the nimble-footed mouse,
Running from house to house.

So all along the tender blades
Of soft and vivid grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass
In noisy continuity until their stony rattle
Seems in itself a battle.

At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden's little length
Some new pleasaunce to find;
And there some yellow daffodils, and jasmine hanging high,
Did rest the tired eye.

The fairest and most fragrant
Of the many sweets we found
Was a little bush of Daphne flower
Upon a mossy mound,
And so thick were the blossoms set and so divine the scent,
That we were well content.

Hungry for Spring I bent my head,
The perfume fanned my face,
And all my soul was dancing
In that lovely little place,
Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and shattered towns
Away . . . upon the Downs.

I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
A-courting on the leas.
And meadows, with their glittering streams--and silver-scurrying dace--
Home, what a perfect place!

_E. Wyndham Tennant_




A PETITION


All that a man might ask thou hast given me, England,
Birthright and happy childhood's long heart's-ease,
And love whose range is deep beyond all sounding
And wider than all seas:
A heart to front the world and find God in it.
Eyes blind enow but not too blind to see
The lovely things behind the dross and darkness,
And lovelier things to be;
And friends whose loyalty time nor death shall weaken
And quenchless hope and laughter's golden store--
All that a man might ask thou hast given me, England,
Yet grant thou one thing more:
That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendour,
Unversed in arms, a dreamer such, as I,
May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy,
England, for thee to die.