To Francis Fowler Hogan.
I think at first like us he did not seeThe goal to which the screaming eagles flew;For romance lured him, France, and chivalry;But Oh! Before the end he knew, he knew!And gave his first full love to Liberty,And met her face to face one lurid nightWhile the guns boomed their shuddering minstrelsyAnd all the Argonne glowed with demon light.And Liberty herself came through the wood,And with her dear, boy lover kept the tryst;Clasped in her grand, Greek arms he understoodWhose were the fatal lips that he had kissed—Lips that the soul of Youth has loved from old—Hot lips of Liberty that kiss men cold.
Connigis from Bois de la Jutte, July, 1918.
Left to its fate, the little village standsBetween the armies trenched on either hill,Raising twin spires like supplicating handsFrom meadow lands where all lies ghastly still.
The lakes of clover ripple to the breezeAs from the vineyards glides a rancid breath,Bringing the homelike murmur of the bees,Mixed with a sickening whiff of carrion death.
It is the valley of the shadow there,Where death lies ambushed in the tossing flowersWhose very beauty seems to cry, "Beware!"For terror haunts its villages and towers.
That home where peasants led their blameless life,That thatched, stone cottage is a clever trapWith painful wounds and fatal danger rife,Noted with two red circles on the map.
Seen through the glass, dead, sleeps thepetite place.Where white-capped housewives lingered once to chatOn market days, or after early mass;Now nothing moves there but the stealthy cat—
The only thing that even dares to stir;It hugs short shadows near the walls at noon,Lashing its tail to hear an airplane purr,Circling about a peering, fat balloon.
The houses gleam too bright, their limelight glare,Pure sunlight though it be, is filled with gloom;They are too white, too garnished and too bare—They are too much like walls about a tomb.
The windows stare beside each gaping door,Where once in gingham apron and a shawl,In days now passed away forevermore,Some little mother sat and nursed her doll.
Sepulchral silence and a lonely dreadAnd desolation's calm have settled down,Making brief peace there for the rigid dead—Tonight the shells will burst upon the town!
How like high mountain air this air in France;The sun is so intense, so clear, so bright,The fields unearthly green, the poplars glance,Shivering their leafy lances in the light.Those drilling troops flash back a steely gleam.Others with distant din of clean delight,Bathe where their bodies flash along the streamAnd everywhere, the air, a lake of light!
White light, strange light of tense romantic days,You are too rare, too cloudless and too clear,Like a deep crystal where a seer might gazeAnd see some vast disaster drawing near.
Petite Villiers,July 4th, 1918.
Deep in the mystery of the woodland's gloom,Topping the sea of trees with pointed cone,So that from many hills its towers loom,The old château of Beaumont stands alone.This generation saw its last sons goTo spill their noble blood with humbler men;So Madame lives alone at the châteauAnd waits for steps that never come again.The sunlight sleeps along the buttressed walls,And on the stagnant moats the midges dance,And in the haunted wood the cuckoo calls,Where hunted once the vanished kings of France.The terraced gardens hum with greedy bees,And Madame walks among the orange trees.
Boxed orange shrubs—they stand in potted rowAlong the plaisance—Madame takes her ease;But it is lonely at the old château;The milky statues glimmer through the trees,So silent, too! What can make Madame start?Down in the garden where late roses blow,She has heard laughter there that stopt her heartLike echoes from old summers long ago.But no—it cannot be! For hark! the clickOf little peasants' sabots; down the walkThat winds among the rows of hedges thick,The children's voices die away in talk.Alas! Who knows, who knows,Why Madame bends so long above the rose?
Gently, old heart—there is no recompenseFor the last uttermost you had to give.Yet there is peace for you to outward sense—God gives you Beaumont as a place to live.The white herds graze in stately indolence,While you sit knitting on the terrace there,And that your hands still feel no impotence,Witness the poor andCroix Rougeat St. Pierre;And sweet the drive home through the wooded park,When faintly chime the far-off steeple clocksAt dusk when village dogs begin to bark,And the long lanes go glimmering white with flocks,When the first, steely stars begin to peepAnd the young shepherd whistles to his sheep.
St. Pierre-Le Moutier,1918.
Here in this garden where the roses bloom,And time is scarcely marked by silent days,The walls and pear trees cast a pleasant gloom,A wavy, weed-grown fountain softly plays.And fate has left us listless for a whileUpon the brink of what we do not know;Outside the walls a passing schoolboy calls,And lumbering oxcarts rumble as they go.
Red roofs, a spire, white roads and poplar trees;An aeroplane goes droning through the skies;The petals fall, there is no breath of breeze;The old dog by the sundial snaps at flies.My comrades by the fountain are asleep.Far on the lines I hear a great gun boom;Here in the garden, though, white peace lies deep,And in the limelight heat the roses bloom.
We held the last stone wall—when day was red—They crept like morning shadows through the dead,Theflammenwerferwith their dragon's breathCompressed in nippled bottle-tanks of death.
They puffed along the wall and one long cryWithered away into the morning sky,And some made crablike gestures where they layAnd all our faces turned oil gray,Before the smoke rolled by.
It is beyond beliefHow men can liveAll curled up like a leaf.
I saw a man bloom in a flower of flame,Roaring with fire,Three times he called a name;Three times he whirled within a white-hot podWith busy hands and cried, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"
Now when the crumpets lie with blusterous joyAnd the silk, wind-tweaked colors virgin fresh,Borne by the blithe, boy bodies glitter past,As the old gladiators throw their mesh;The dragon's breath leaps from the bugle blastAnd Azrael comes pounding with his drum—Fe, fe, ... fi, fo, fum—I smell the roasting flesh!
We who have come back from the war,And stand upright and draw full breath,Seek boldly what life holds in storeAnd eat its whole fruit rind and core,Before we enter through the doorTo keep our rendezvous with death.
We who have walked with death in France,When all the world with death was rife,Who came through all that devils' dance,When life was but a circumstance,A sniper's whim, a bullet's glance,We have a rendezvous with life!
With life that hurtles like a sparkFrom stricken steel where anvils chime,That leaps the space from dark to dark,A blinding, blazing, flaming arc,As clean as fire, and frank and stark—White life that lives while there is time.
We will not live by musty creeds,Who learned the truth through love and war,Who tipped the scales for right by deeds,When old men's lies were broken reeds,We follow where the cold fact leadsAnd bow our heads no more.
Deliver us from tactless kin,And drooling bores that start "reforms,"And unctious folk that prate of sin,And theorists without a chin,And politicians out to win,And generals in uniforms.
We have come back who broke the lineThe hard Hun held by bomb and knife!All but the blind can read the sign;The time is ours by right divine,Who drank with Death in blood red wine,We have a rendezvous with life!
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