I'm thinking you'd be glad, Though the angels make your bed, Could you see the care we've had To respect you--now you're dead.
I saw the spires of Oxford As I was passing by, The grey spires of Oxford Against the pearl-grey sky. My heart was with the Oxford men Who went abroad to die.
The years go fast in Oxford, The golden years and gay, The hoary Colleges look down On careless boys at play. But when the bugles sounded war They put their games away.
They left the peaceful river, The cricket-field, the quad, The shaven lawns of Oxford, To seek a bloody sod-- They gave their merry youth away For country and for God.
God rest you, happy gentlemen, Who laid your good lives down, Who took the khaki and the gun Instead of cap and gown. God bring you to a fairer place Than even Oxford town.
Francis Brett Young, who is a novelist as well as a poet, and who has been called, by _The Manchester Guardian_, "one of the promising evangelists of contemporary poetry," has written much that is both graceful and grave. There is music and a message in his lines that seem to have as their motto: "Trust in the true and fiery spirit of Man." Best known as a writer of prose, his most prominent works are _Marching on Tanga_ and _The Crescent Moon_.
Brett Young's _Five Degrees South_ (1917) and his _Poems 1916-18_ (1919) contain the best of his verse.
This is the image of my last content: My soul shall be a little lonely lake, So hidden that no shadow of man may break The folding of its mountain battlement; Only the beautiful and innocent Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake Of churned cloud in a howling wind's descent. For there shall be no terror in the night When stars that I have loved are born in me, And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair; But this shall be the end of my delight:-- That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see Your image in the mirrored beauty there.
Known chiefly as an authority on modern French poetry, F. S. Flint has published several volumes of original imagist poems, besides having translated works of Verhaeren and Jean de Bosschere.
London, my beautiful, it is not the sunset nor the pale green sky shimmering through the curtain of the silver birch, nor the quietness; it is not the hopping of birds upon the lawn, nor the darkness stealing over all things that moves me.