Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/106

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For Remembrance

paper. He was just turned twenty when he was killed by a shell in Flanders on 6th May 1917. The romance of war had no lure for him, but it is easy to understand how impossible it was for one who held, as he so obviously did, by the old sanctities and ideals of progress and human right to stand apart and see them desecrated and destroyed under the iron heel of the Hun. There is the true gold of poetry and promise that can never be fulfilled in the best of his work—in 'A Song of Youth,' the 'Ode to Death,' some of the love songs, and in the 'Ode to Dusk,' with its exquisite close—

Listen. I hear the trumpets of the angels wind
Their call across the bordered infinite;
And Dusk, with all her panoply of falling light,
Is gone to kneel, adoring, at the feet
Which Mary Magdalen anointed, meet,
With richest spikenard
And fragrant costliest nard.

His sympathies went out to the weak and the wronged; for all his youth, he had probed much into the world's unhappiness and was passionate to help to bring in the reign of justice and righteousness,