A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919/Next Morning
NEXT MORNING
I
TO-DAY the sun shines bright,
The skies are fair;
There is a delicate freshness in the air,
Which, like a nimble sprite,
Plays lightly on my cheek and lifts my hair.
And, as I look about me—lo!
I see a world I do not know!
As though some soft celestial beam,
Some clean and wholesome grace
Had purgèd half the foulness of the place
To a strange beauty.—Was it then a dream,
That ghostly march, but yesternight,
Beneath the moon's uncertain light,
When, chill at heart, we pick'd our way
Thro' dreadful silent things, that lay
About our path on either hand?
Was it a dream? Is this the self-same land,
The land we pass'd thro' then?
How strange it seems!—Yet 'tis the same!
I see from here the path by which we came.
The tumbled soil, the shatter'd trees are there!
And there, in desolation sleeping,
Almost too pitiful for weeping,
The little village—once the home of men!
Aye! the whole scene is there!
As desperate in its abandonment,
As melancholy-wild and savage-bare
As then.—But somehow, in this warm, bright air
It all seems different!
The same—and yet I know it not!
II
Thus much I see.—But there's a spot
That's hidden from mine eyes!
Behind the ruin'd church it lies,
Where gaping vaults, beneath the nave,
Have made a dreadful kind of cave;
And there, before the cavern's mouth,
A dark and stagnant pool is spread
So silent and so still!
I saw it last i' th' pale moonlight;
And I could think that shapes uncouth
Crept from that cave at dead of night
With ghoulish stealth, to feast their fill
Upon the pale and huddled dead!
Yet now,
Haply, beneath this warm sunlight,
Even that fearsome pool is bright,
Under the cavern's brow!
So outward fair, that none might guess
The secret of its hideousness,
Nor know what nameless things are done
There, with the setting of the sun!