Where phantom armies foin and feint And bloody victories are won From the time when stars are faint To the rising of the sun.
With banners broken, and the roll Of drums, at dawn the phantoms fly: A man must commune with his soul When he marches out to die.
O day of wrath and of desire! For each may know upon this day Whether he be a thing of fire Or fettered to the traitor clay.
Such is the hazard that is thrown: We know not how the dice may fall: All the secrets shall be known Or else we shall not know at all.
Into that dry and most desolate place With heavy gait they dragged the stretcher in And laid him on the bloody ground: the din Of Maxim fire ceased not. I raised his head, And looked into his face, And saw that he was dead. Saw beneath matted curls the broken skin That let the bullet in; And saw the limp, lithe limbs, the smiling mouth... (Ah, may we smile at death As bravely....) the curv’d lips that no more drouth Should blacken, and no sweetly stirring breath Mildly displace. So I covered the calm face And stripped the shirt from his firm breast, and there, A zinc identity disc, a bracelet of elephant hair I found.... Ah, God, how deep it stings This unendurable pity of small things!
But more than this I saw, That dead stranger welcoming, more than the raw And brutal havoc of war. England I saw, the mother from whose side He came hither and died, she at whose hems he had play’d, In whose quiet womb his body and soul were made. That pale, estrangèd flesh that we bowed over Had breathed the scent in summer of white clover; Dreamed her cool fading nights, her twilights long, And days as careless as a blackbird’s song Heard in the hush of eve, when midges’ wings Make a thin music, and the night-jar spins. (For it is summer, I thought, in England now....) And once those forward gazing eyes had seen Her lovely living green: that blackened brow Cool airs, from those blue hills moving, had fann’d-- Breath of that holy land Whither my soul aspireth without despair: In the broken brain had many a lovely word Awakened magical echoes of things heard, Telling of love and laughter and low voices, And tales in which the English heart rejoices In vanishing visions of childhood and its glories: Old-fashioned nursery rhymes and fairy stories: Words that only an English tongue could tell.