“His poems are very wonderful. His ‘Song of the Pilgrims’ is one of the most exquisite things I have ever read. One feels that a great poet died in Lemnos, a victim to that fatal Gallipoli error. One drop of his blood was worth an ocean of Hun gore. If he could do such in youth, what might he not have done in maturity?”
And here’s the ‘Song of the Pilgrims’, by Rupert Brooke:
(Halted around the fire by night, after moon-set, they sing this beneath the trees.)
What light of unremembered skies
Hast thou relumed within our eyes,
Thou whom we seek, whom we shall find?…
A certain odour on the wind,
Thy hidden face beyond the west,
These things have called us; on a quest
Older than any road we trod,
More endless than desire….
Far God,
Sigh with thy cruel voice, that fills
The soul with longing for dim hills
And faint horizons! For there come
Grey moments of the antient dumb
Sickness of travel, when no song
Can cheer us; but the way seems long;
And one remembers….
Ah! the beat
Of weary unreturning feet,
And songs of pilgrims unreturning!…
The fires we left are always burning
On the old shrines of home. Our kin
Have built them temples, and therein
Pray to the Gods we know; and dwell
In little houses lovable,
Being happy (we remember how!)
And peaceful even to death
O Thou,
God of all long desirous roaming,
Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing,
And crying after lost desire.
Hearten us onward! as with fire
Consuming dreams of other bliss.
The best Thou givest, giving this
Sufficient thing — to travel still
Over the plain, beyond the hill,
Unhesitating through the shade,
Amid the silence unafraid,
Till, at some sudden turn, one sees
Against the black and muttering trees
Thine altar, wonderfully white,
Among the Forests of the Night.
Her comment here interests me. There’s a scene in Saving Private Ryan where the camera pans over the hundreds of corpses on Omaha Beach before settling on one of the Ryan boys; when I watch that scene or see a photograph or read about the casualties of war, I often wonder what these men (and now women) might have offered the world if the wars had not taken their lives. It is easy to point at a jet engine or an artificial limb and say that a war spurred us in new technological directions, but you can’t point at a white cross inscribed with “Unknown” and say that the next Benjamin Franklin is under there.
Yes, Bill. Exactly. The thought of what might have been with all of these young men tormented her … especially with someone who had already shown such promise in a field which (obviously) interested her – poetry.