you may read in those lines of his picturing the soldier looking up at a lark in the Spring sky and thinking of his waking farm in England:
The deep thatch of the roof—all shadow-flecked—
The clank of pails at the pump ... the day begun.
'After the war ...,' he thought....
And then a sound grew out of the morning,
And a shell came, moving a destined way,
Thin and swift and lustful, making its moan.
A moment his brave white body knew the Spring,
The next it lay
In a red ruin of blood and guts and bone.
Oh! nothing was tortured there! Nothing could know
How death blasphemed all men and their high birth
With his obscenities. Already moved,
Within those shattered tissues, that dim force
Which is the ancient alchemy of Earth,
Changing him to the very flowers he loved.
'Nothing was tortured there!' Oh, pretty thought!
When God Himself might well bow down his head
And hide his haunted eyes before the dead.
Yet this irony and anger are not more characteristic of him than are the tenderness in such a snatch of song as—
Dear, if your blinded eyes could see
The path my thoughts have worn to you...
