Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BURIAL IN ENGLAND, by JAMES ELROY FLECKER



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BURIAL IN ENGLAND, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: These then we honour: these in fragrant earth
Last Line: Shall gather at the gate of paradise.
Subject(s): Funerals; Patriotism; Burials


These then we honour: these in fragrant earth
Of their own country in great peace forget
Death's lion-roar and gust of nostril-flame
Breathing souls across to the Evening Shore.
Soon over these the flowers of our hill-sides
Shall wake and wave and nod beneath the bee
And whisper love to Zephyr year on year,
Till the red war gleam like a dim red rose
Lost in the garden of the Sons of Time.
But ah what thousands no such friendly doom
Awaits, -- whom silent comrades in full night
Gazing right and left shall bury swiftly
By the cold flicker of an alien moon.
Ye veiled women, ye with folded hands,
Mourning those you half hoped for Death too dear,
I claim no heed of you. Broader than earth
Love stands eclipsing nations with his wings,
While Pain, his shadow, delves as black and deep
As he e'er flamed or flew. Citizens draw
Back from their dead awhile. Salute the flag!
If this flag though royally always borne,
Deceived not dastard, ever served base gold;
If the dark children of the old Forest
Once feared it, or ill Sultans mocked it furled,
Yet now as on a thousand death-reaped days
It takes once more the unquestionable road.
O bright with blood of heroes, not a star
Of all the north shines purer on the sea!
Our foes -- the hardest men a state can forge,
An army wrenched and hammered like a blade
Toledo-wrought neither to break nor bend,
Dipped in that ice the pedantry of power,
And toughened with wry gospels of dismay;
Such are these who brake down the door of France,
Wolves worrying at the old World's honour,
Hunting Peace not to prison but her tomb.
but ever as some brown song-bird whose torn nest
Gapes robbery, darts on the hawk like fire,
So Peace hath answered, angry and in arms.
And from each grey hamlet and bright town of France
From where the apple or the olive grows
Or thin tall strings of poplars on the plains,
From the rough castle of the central hills,
From the three coasts -- of mist and storm and sun,
And meadows of the four deep-rolling streams,
From every house whose windows hear God's bell
Crowding the twilight with the wings of prayer
And flash their answer in a golden haze,
Stream the young soldiers who are never tired.
For all the foul mists vanished when that land
Called clear, as in the sunny Alpine morn
The jodeler awakes the frosty slopes
To thunderous replies, -- soon fading far
Among the vales like songs of dead children.
But the French guns' answer, ne'er to echoes weak
Diminshed, bursts from the deep trenches vet;
And its least light vibration blew to dust
The weary factions, -- priest's or guild's or king's,
And side by side troop up the old partisans,
The same laughing, invincible, tough men
Who gave Napoleon Europe like a loaf,
For slice and portion, -- not so long ago!
Either to Alsace or loved lost Lorraine
They pass, or inexpugnable Verdun
Ceintured with steel, or stung with faith's old cry
Assume God's vengeance for his temple stones.
But you maybe best wish them for the north
Beside you 'neath low skies in loamed fields,
Or where the great line hard on the duned shore
Ends and night leaps to England's sea-borne flame.
Never one drop of Lethe's stagnant cup
Dare dim the fountains of the Marne and Aisne
Since still the flowers and meadow-grass unmown
Lie broken with the imprint of those who fell,
Briton and Gaul -- but fell immortal friends
And fell victorious and like tall trees fell.
But young men, you who loiter in the town,
Need you be roused with overshouted words,
Country, Empire, Honour, Liege, Louvain?
Pay your own Youth the duty of her dreams.
For what sleep shall keep her from the thrill
Of War's star-smiting music, with its swell
Of shore and forest and horns high in the wind,
(Yet pierced with that too sharp piping which if man
Hear and not fear he shall face God unscathed)?
What, are you poets whose vain souls contrive
Sorties and sieges spun of the trickling moon
And such a rousing ghost-catastrophe
You need no concrete marvels to be saved?
Or live you here too lustily for change?
Sail you such pirate seas on such high quests,
Hunt you thick gold or striped and spotted beasts,
Or tread the lone ways of the swan-like mountains?
Excused. But if, as I think, breeched in blue,
Stalled at a counter, cramped upon a desk,
You drive a woman's pencraft -- or a slave's,
What chain shall hold you when the trumpets play,
Calling from the blue hill behind your town,
Calling over the seas, calling for you!
"But" -- do you murmur? -- "we'd not be as those.
Death is a dour recruiting-sergeant: see,
These women weep, we celebrate the dead."
Boys, drink the cup of warning dry. Face square
That old grim hazard, "Glory-or-the-Grave."
Not we shall trick your pleasant years away,
Yet is not Death the great adventure still,
And is it all loss to set ship clean anew
When heart is young and life an eagle poised?
Choose, you're no cowards. After all, think some,
Since we are men and shrine immortal souls
Surely for us as for these nobly dead
The Kings of England lifting up their swords
Shall gather at the gate of Paradise.





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