i6 
LAND & WATER 
April 19, 1917 
The Fighting Poets 
By E. B. psborn 
IT IS easv to distin^iiish between the war poetry of civil- 
ians and" tluit which has been written by seamen, soldiers 
Mil flying men who are servinj;, or have served, in tlic 
present w;ir. The former is for tiie most part ephemeral 
sliiti ; Willi the excei>tion of Mr. Laurence Binyon's fine 
ode Jo !/ic I- Illicit, whicli is not marred by its maker's rather 
tliiii \-irtuositv, and lialf a dozen pieces as simple and sincere, 
■all of it is likely to be cast into the waste-paper basket of 
oblivion. It is iuUof mud. blood, kliaki and Germans— fom' 
t!iiiii,'s which tiie fighting poet most sedulously avoids. It 
is curious liow seldom he mentions or. even remembers his 
giizard-liearted enemies. In the course of making an an- 
thology to illustrate the various spirit of British warfare and 
to give impressions tliereof from witliin, I ha\e read nearly 
two thousand of his pieces -one in three of them as yet un- 
priutetl-and oiily six of them arc addressed to the Germans 
or to Germanj-, Of tljose six not one is abusive or argumen- 
tative ; tliey are all'Cmttcn in sorrow rather than in anger ; 
and the most deeply-jiendered is a sonnet by the late Captain 
Cliarles fl. Sbriey, which thus expounds the causa caiisans of 
Armageddon : 
Vou only saw your future largely planned, 
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind, 
And in each other's deare.st ways we stand, 
And hiss and hate. And the blind light the blind. 
No civilian poet, not being a professed Pacifist, could have 
written tliesc lines, which any German rnight take as an 
aholagia pro ritiis siiis. The explanation is not far to seek. 
' No ci\'ilised soldier hates liis enemy, howsoever hateful, 
when he has wreaked his anger on him ; and the last thing 
an Englishman would tliink of doing, when he returns to 
l>illots, is to write in tlie style of Lissauer's Hymn of Hate. 
^ So that the stuff out of which he^^eaves his poem is not passion, 
but pas«»ion in retrospect-rwhich, as every critic laiows, is 
the onlv durable stuff. Corollary: no non-combatant will 
■nvike great poems of tliis soul- torturing struggle until " the 
■Red War isa dim, red rose in Time," and his perplexed mood 
has passed away with all its ineffectual rage and anguish. 
Another characteristic, of the work of the soldier poets 
is the absence- of the patriotic, note, the scarlet clang of the 
Kiplingcsquo trumpet. The word "patriot "does not occur 
oiice in all the two thousand pieces I have read. But why ? 
Because the soltUer's love of his land, for which he willingly 
sacrifices all that he has been, all that he might be. is some- 
thing inexpressive, never to be directly intended, much less 
anatomised in terms of 'ics and 'isms. Even so married 
lovers, in the first abounding joy of possession, never discuss 
the nature of loVe, but talk only of trifling matters which are 
yet symbols of their al-onc-ment. The soldier instinctively 
feels that, as soon as ever loye of one's country and all that 
inhabits .there is thought of as " patriotism," the best of 
its spiritual fragrance is beginning to be lost. It is 
th(;n as a flower entered in a botanist's museum; a 
quality, once mysterious and wonderful and- inexplicable 
which must now be explained ; a thing to be dried, dissected, 
lectured upon, argued ajpouc. And in the end this mere philo- 
sophic "ism is apt tojbecomc nothing better than a form of 
politics; a- trick of logomachy which the partisan may seize 
for his own wearing and refuse to all his opponents. Hence 
the oft-quoted saying; of Dr. Johnson, which has been so 
frequently, and ^o foolishly, used as an argument ip favour 
of the cosmopolite's contention that man is but parcelled out 
in men by a sense of nationality. 
Wisely and warily, then, the fighting poets nevfeb put to 
their lips the brazen trumpet of self-conscious patriotism. 
Their love of country is expressed in a various symbolism — in 
longing, lingering glances at the life that has been theirs' 
beyond waves of the tears of eternity ranged agafn^'them. 
Kujxirt Brooke's wonderful sonnet which begins : .Mm > 
If I should die, think only this of me 
That tlierc'.s some corner of a foreign field 
That is for evLT^ England. - ' . , 
is a subtle and' tender form of this beautiful svntbolism. 
Lieutenaut Geoffrey Howard's England, though n^' nearly 
so well known, is as fine in a more direct way. In tlie octave 
of his sonnet he speaks magnificently of the 'f;u niniL' might 
of the land adored : . ' 
Her seed is sown al>>ut the world. The seas 
For Her have path'd their waters. She is known 
In swamps that steam about the burning zone,- 
And dreaded in the last while lands that ireez^. ,^,^ 
to contrast it tenderly in the sestcttc with the littleness of 
rn^ 
And she. is very small ana very green 
• And full of little lanes all dense with flowra 
That wipd ulofig and lose themselves bcfwccn 
Mossed farms, and parks and fields of quiet sheep, 
And in the hamlets wliere the stalwarts sleep. 
Low bells chime out from old ehu-liiddcn towers. 
It is not the best jirosody— but it is such great poetry as to 
teach as Marvel! taught us, that there is a time to use the file 
and a time to use it not. Another poem, altogether worthy of 
comparison with these two sonnets, is that in which Lieutenant 
Robert Nichols sees, on going to the war, only the aspect of 
famiUar fields, hears only the familiar sounds of the evening 
— and knows at last that a price must be paid in service, 
blissful, sacrificial, keen, for all the remembered loveliness 
now so far away : 
I see the thrown 
Twilight of the huge, empty down 
Soon blotted put ! For now a lane 
Glitters with warmth of May-lime rain. 
And on a shooting briar I see 
A yellow bird who sings to me. 
O yellow. hammer, once I heard 
Thv yaffle when no other bird 
C^oiild to my stink heart comfort bring. 
But now I would not have thee sing. 
So sharjj thy note is with the pain 
Of England I may not sec again ! 
Yet sing thy song ; thus answereth 
Deep in me a voice that saith ; 
'J'/ie gorse upon the Iwilit down. 
The English loam so sunset brown. 
The bowed pines and the sheep belts damoftr. 
The wet, lit lane and the yellow hammer^ 
The orchard and the chaffinch song. 
Only to the ^brcne belong 
And he shall lose their joy Jo/ aye 
If their price he cannot pay. 
When this poet'.6-book is presently published.,.4ic %vill, I feel 
sure, be welcomed as among the greatest of living poets. 
Through him. and through the two Grcnfells, the late Lieu- 
tenant William Noel Hodgson, and others is fulfilled the 
saying of Captain Robert Graves in A Renascence :— 
On Achi Baba's rock their bones 
Whiten aud on Elanders' plain. 
But of 'their travailings and groans, 
Poetry 'is lx)rn again. 
At any rate, .the war has killed the fame and name of the 
" half men with their dirty songs and dreary " of whom 
Rupert Brooke speaks in yet another noble war sonnet. 
But to give one more example of the love of country 
set forth in thenearest symbol, we find a seaman — Lieutenant 
Noel H. M. torbet, R.N., remembering most vividly in 
the waters of the North Sea under the pallid Northern Lights 
the quiet loveliness of his secret England : 
And once again in that fair dream I sec the sibilant, swift 
stream — 
Now gloomy-green and now agleam — that flows by Furnace 
Mill, 
And hear the plover's plaintive cry above the common at 
Holtye, 
When realy glows the dusky sky and all the woods are still. 
There is but little sea-verse for the anthologist to gather ; 
perhaps because sea-time in war-time gives too scant leisure for 
verse-making. The best of the few I have found are either 
tradition or ritual, as in Commander W. M. James's Song of 
the While Ensign : 
Tens of thousands pay homage as they raise me with loving 
hands 
And free my soul in the morning to the drums of a hundred 
bands ; 
And thousands again salute me as the sun sinks down in 
the West, 
For My Lords liave ordained that the sun and I go down 
together to rest. ■ 
And, in passing, be it said that what M. Edmond Rostand 
• once called "the blue laurel of the air," has not yet been 
I firmly grasped by any other hand. Lieutenant Gordon Alchin, 
I R.F.C., has taken his wings as a poet of the air, but as yet it is 
' a gunner— Captain Gilbert l'"rankau — who has written the 
best ballad of war flying. Eyes in tiie Air is a brilliant picture 
of aeroplanes at the work of registering : 
Flicked but unsnared we hover, 
1 Edged planes agaiTist the sun : 
Eyes in the air above liis lair. 
The hawks that guide the gun ". 
But no poet has vet sung of the " stately 'planes " released 
from their daily servitude to the howitzers whose shells they 
sec passing under at tiic liighest point of a swift parabola — it 
