And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
And on the tangled wires
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: --
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops,
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
His death was briefly noticed in one or two French papers.
The 'Matin' published a translation of part of the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15",
and remarked that "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it."
But France had no time, even if she had had the knowledge,
to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her.
That will come later. One day France will know that this unassuming
soldier of the Legion,
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette,
was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned among her defenders.
The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They contain lines which he would
doubtless have remodelled had he lived to review them in tranquillity --
perhaps one or two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood,
which, on reflection he would have rejected.* But they not only show
a great advance on his earlier work: they rank high, or I am much mistaken,
among the hitherto not very numerous poems in the English language produced,
not in mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual stress
and under its haunting menace.
--
* Neither in the "Juvenilia" nor in the "Last Poems"
has anything been suppressed that he himself ever thought of publishing.
Indeed nothing at all has been omitted, except two early poems
on which he had written "These are worthless."
--
Again and again in the "Last Poems"--notably in "Maktoob"
with its tribute to
The resignation and the calm
And wisdom of the East,
he returns to the note of fatalism. Here he has not only
the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side.
Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling.
But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests
all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil deeds.
Not even at Alan Seeger's bidding can we quite persuade ourselves that,
when he took up arms for France, he was exercising no brave,
no generous choice, but was the conscript of Destiny.
William Archer.