No poet has voiced America's reasons for being in the war as has
Oxenham, and nowhere does he do it better than in "Where Are You
Going, Great-Heart?" the concluding stanza of which sums up compactly
America's high purposes:
"Where are you going, Great-Heart?
'To set all burdened peoples free;
To win for all God's liberty;
To 'stablish His sweet Sovereignty.'
God goeth with you, Great-Heart!"
The Vision Splendid.
To those who go to die in war the poet addresses himself in lines which
he titles "On Eagle Wings":
"Higher than most, to you is given
To live--or in His time, to die;
So, bear you as White Knights of Heaven--
The very flower of chivalry!
Take Him as Pilot by your side,
And 'All is well' whate'er betide."
The Vision Splendid.
"If God be with you, who can be against you?" is the echo that we hear
going and coming behind these great Christian lines. Indeed, behind
every poem that Oxenham writes we can hear the echoes of some great
scriptural word of promise, or hope or faith or courage. The Christian,
as well as those who never saw the Bible or a church, will feel at home
with this poet anywhere. The advantage that the Christian will have in
reading him is that he will understand him better.
Turning to those who stay at home and have lost loved ones, with what
sympathy and deep, tender understanding does he write in "To You Who
Have Lost." You may almost see a great kindly father standing by your
side, his warm hand in yours as he sings:
"I know! I know!--
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe--
The pang of loss--
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross.
'Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken,... Oh, my son I my son!'"
"Yea--think of this!--
Yea, rather think on this!--
He died as few men get the chance to die--
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and Right, and Liberty--
And such a death is Immortality."
All's Well.
If those who have lost loved ones "Over There" cannot be buoyed by
that, I know not what will buoy them, what will comfort.
Oxenham too gives us a picture of a battlefield where birds sing and
roses bloom, just as do Service and several other poets who have been
in the midst of the conflict. We have become familiar with this
picture, but no writer yet has caught its full, eternal meaning and
pressed it down into three lines for the world as has this man; in
"Here, There, and Everywhere":
"Man proposes--God disposes;
Yet our hope in Him reposes
Who in war-time still makes roses."
The Fiery Cross.
But this poet in his interpretation of war does not forget peace; does
not forget that it is coming; does not forget that the world is hungry
for it; does not forget that it is the duty of the poets and the
thinking men and women of the world not only to get ready for it, but
to lead the way to it.