lyrics as 'For City Folk' and 'A Soldier in Hospital,' and 'The Rainbow,' written while he was in the trenches in France, is filled with a limitless gratitude for the common gifts of life and a sure faith in the new day that burgeons at the heart of all the darkness:
I watch the white dawn gleam
To the thunder of hidden guns;
I hear the hot shells scream
Through skies as sweet as a dream
Where the silver dawnbreak runs;
And stabbing of light
Scorches the virginal white;
But I feel in my being the old, high, sanctified thrill,
And I thank the gods that the dawn is beautiful still.
From death that hurtles by
I crouch in the trench day-long,
But up to a cloudless sky
From the ground where our dead men lie
A brown lark soars in song.
Through the tortured air,
Rent by the shrapnel's flare,
Over the troubleless dead he carols his fill,
And I thank the gods that the birds are beautiful still.
Where the parapet is low
And level with the eye,
Poppies and cornflowers grow,
And the corn sways to and fro
