314 Mr. Laurence Binyon [May 31, 



emotions made articulate in poetry, as the only adequate expression 

 of them, was felt and shown among whole classes of people quite 

 unused to literary interests. And this was surely a remarkable thing. 

 Recall the two other great times of crisis in our national history : 

 the struggle against Philip of Spain, the struggle against Napoleon. 

 I do not know what contemporary demand was made on our poets 

 in those two eventful times, both of them periods of great splendour 

 for English poetry. But at any rate there was very little direct 

 reflection in poetry pf the national emotion. Drayton, in the time 

 of the Spanish Armada, sang of xigincourt and Henry V. It was 

 left for Tennyson to sing of Sir Richard Grenville and the last fight 

 of the " Revenge." Imagine how our journalist-critics, if they had 

 flourished in those days as they flourish now, would have scolded 

 Shakespeare for wasting his gifts on the outlandish stories he took 

 for his tragedies, instead of making poetry out of the heroic England 

 of his own time ! In the Napoleonic period we have a few fine 

 ballads by Campbell. We have the famous stanzas on Waterloo in 

 " Childe Harold," Wolfe's " Burial of Sir John Moore," and a poem 

 by Scott which no one now reads. It was left for Thomas Hardy in 

 our own time to make a great poetic picture of the vast European 

 struggle. It is true that we have the noble sonnets of Wordsworth. 

 But I wonder how many readers those sonnets then had, or how 

 much they meant to the nation at the time. Far less, I think, than 

 they mean to us at this moment. It is our generation, in its hour 

 of trial, that those sonnets have strengthened and sustained. We 

 get weary of the most vivid descriptions of the battle-field ; but 

 we do not weary of the strain of sonnets like that to Tou?saint 

 rOuveiture — 



** Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men ! 

 Whether the whistling rustic tend his plough 

 Within thy hearing, or thy head be now 

 PiUowed in some deep dungeon's earless den ; 

 miserable cheftain, where and when 

 Wilt thou find patience ? Yet die not ! Do thou 

 Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow. 

 Though fallen thyself, never to rise again. 

 Live, and take comfort ! Thou has left behind 

 Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies : 

 There's not a breathing of the common wind 

 That will forget thee. Thou hast great allies : 

 Thy friends are exultations, agonies, 

 And love, and man's unconquerable mind," 



What does this testimony of experience indicate ? It shows for 

 one thing that poets do not instinctively turn to the events of their 

 own day as subjects for their song ; rather, that their instinct is to 

 choose events at some distance from themselves. Yet we need not 

 assume that they are indifferent to contemporary things ; and there 

 is no doubt that the overthrow of the Spanish attempt upon England, 



