Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!—
the 'In Memoriam' quatrain for Easter 1915—
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them, and will do never again—
and apart from a stray line or so glooming in some picture of country life, like a cloud that drifts momentarily across the sun, there is little of the influence of war in them—less than there is in the songs of Francis Ledwidge. Both were lovers of nature and poured their love of her into verse of an exquisite simplicity, but Thomas was the more reticent, the more scholarly; he had not Ledwidge's artlessness, and though he had the same emotional tenderness was not so simply unreserved in revealing it. The war stirred both of
