Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/241

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241
INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS

TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT OF GOD
(Elizabeth Dorothy)

IN wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

The Field, before
Guillemont, Somme,
September 4, 1916.


THE RAINBOW
"And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud."—Genesis, Chap. ix. 14.

I WATCH the white dawn gleam,
To the thunder of hidden guns.
I hear the hot shells scream
Through skies as sweet as a dream
Where the silver dawnbreak runs,
And stabbing of light
Scorches the virginal white.
But I feel in my being the old, high, sanctified thrill,
And I thank the gods that the dawn is beautiful still.


From death that hurtles by
I crouch in the trench day-long,
But up in the cloudless sky

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