...Then like grim warriors of old
Let 's glory in our scars,
And read aright, my doubting wight,
God's emblem of the stars:
Our highest, best achieved—behold,
A higher niche and sphere!
Nor deem the battle lost or won,
There 's something yet beyond the sun
When our brief thread of life is spun
And sorrows disappear:
A myriad suns beyond the sun,
Serene, resplendent, clear!
He wrote a play of Hereward the Wake, The Last of the English, that has real poetic and dramatic qualities; and a little before the war he was telling me, in his eager, sanguine fashion, of another play he meant to write, a romance of modern life that should get away from the squalor of the realists and preach a more idealistic philosophy—but all that ended when he fell gallantly in April 1917 heading his men in an attack on the German lines.
Nothing of the war enters into the poems of Harold Parry, though many of them were written whilst he was on active service and sent home on odd scraps of
