Motherland, has the self-same suspicion of the man who brags of his patriotism—party politicians will do well to remember this fact when the war is over and they go vote-hunting once more. In his case only the patriotism which serves in silence counts, or will count at all; the partisan who thinks to curry favour by calling himself a patriot will be in the position of a person who styles himself a gentleman, and so becomes suspected of being merely gentlemanly.
Wisely and warily then, the modern Sidneys and Raleighs never put to their lips the brazen trumpet of self-advertising patriotism. Their love of country is expressed in a varied symbolism—in longing, lingering glances at the land which may not be able to give them even a grave, at the life relinquished which will yet be theirs again for evermore. Rupert Brooke's wonderful sonnet which begins,
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England,
is the subtlest form of this beautiful symbolism—it would be a conceit in the Elizabethan sense but for the deep tenderness which irradiates it with delight from within and lifts it far above the fantastical.
Lieutenant Geoffrey Howard's "England" begins as finely in a more direct way, and is full of pride in the tremendous power of the little land so greatly beloved:
Her seed is sown about the world. The seas
For Her have paved their waters. She is known
In swamps that steam about the burning zone,
And dreaded in the last white lands that freeze.
And altogether worthy of comparison with these two sonnets is the poem in which Lieutenant Robert Nichols is
