All the music of their going,
Ringing, swinging, glad song-throwing,
Earth will echo still, when foot
Lies numb and voice mute.
On, marching men, on
To the gates of death with song.
Sow your gladness for earth's reaping,
So you may be glad, though sleeping.
Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
So be merry, so be dead.
Here, in a splendour of bizarre metaphysical fantasy, is the rapt sense of mystical joy in dying for a great end that shines through Grenfell's 'Into Battle,' and Rupert Brooke's
If I should die think only this of me:
That there 's some corner of a foreign land
That is for ever England...
and is the prevailing note in the poems of J. W. Streets, whose love of life is so intense that he never doubts but he shall pick up the thread of it again on the other side of night:
And if thy twilight fingers round me steal
And draw me unto death—thy votary
Am I. O Life, reach out thy hands to me.
The same ecstasy thrills in his many references to the privilege of offering up
