Here on the blind verge of infinity
We live and move like moles. Our crumbling trench
Gapes like a long wound in the sodden clay.
The land is dead. No voice, no living thing,
No happy green of leaves tells that the spring
Wakes in the world behind us. Empty gloom
Fills the cold interspace of earth and sky.
The sky is waterlogged and the drenched earth
Rots, and the whining sorrow of slow shells
Flies overhead. But memory like the rose
Wakes and puts forth her bright and odorous blooms
And builds green hanging gardens in the heart.
Once, in another life in other places,
Where a slow river coiled through broad green spaces
And sunlight filled the long grass of the meadows
And moving water flashed from shine to shadows
Of old green-feathered willows, bent in ranks
Along sun-speckled banks,—
Lovely remembered things now gone forever;
I saw young men run naked by the river,
Thirty young soldiers. Where the field-path goes,
Their boots and shirts and khaki lay in rows.
With feet among the long warm grass stood one
Like ivory in the sun,
And in the water, white upon the shade
That hung beneath the shore,
His long reflexion like a slow flag swayed
And at the trembling of the water frayed
Into a hundred shreds, then joined once more.
One, where the river, when the willows end,
Breaks from its calm to swirl about a bend,
Strong swimmer he, wrestled against the race
Of the full stream. I saw his laughing face
Framed by his upcurved arm. Another, slim,
Hands above head, stood braced upon the brim,
Then dived, a brother of the curved new moon,
And came up streaming soon
Ten feet beyond, brown shoulders shining wet
And comic face and hair washed sleek as jet.
Out on the further bank another fellow
Climbed stealthily into a leaning willow
And perched leaf-shrouded, crooning like a dove;
Till from the pool below a voice was heard:
“’Ere, Bert! Where’s Bert?” and Bert sang out above:
“Up ’ere, old son, changed to a bloody bird!”
And dived through leaves and shattered through the cool
Clear watery mirror, and all across the pool
Slow winking circles opened wide, till he
Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.
Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.
Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere
Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows
Beat the shores, and the hanging boughs of willows
Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,
A bugle sounded, and their happy din
Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline
By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,
Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright
With bodies swarming up out of the stream.
From the water and the boughs they came in sight:
Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.
Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.
They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.
One, stepping to the water, carefully
Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:
One sat with updrawn knee,
Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.
And gradually the bright and flashing crowd
Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud
Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.
The ranks fell in: no sound, no movement stirred.
The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:
The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,
Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream
And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:
Only the trodden meadow-grass reported
Where all that gay humanity had sported.
So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how
Many of those smart boys no longer now
Cast running shadows on the grass or make
White tents with laughter shake,
But lie in narrow chambers underground,
Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound
Of laughter. Round my post on every hand
Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land
Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost
In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,
Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed
By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.
The rainy evening fades. A rainy night
Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay
Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,
All broken sounds and movements of the day,
To emptiness and listlessness, a grey
Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise
Of hearts intent with fearful expectation
And secret preparation,
Silence that is not peace but bated breath,
A listening for death,
The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.
O give us one more day of sun and leaves,
The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,
And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves
The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,
Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)
We climb the trench and cross the wire and start,
We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart
Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.