Classic and Contemporary Poetry
RETURN OF THE NATIVE, by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: About the ramparts, quiet as a mother Last Line: Incapable to stir a weed or moth. Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund Subject(s): World War I; First World War | ||||||||
ABOUT the Ramparts, quiet as a mother Kissing a child in dreams, the summer night Cast a soft veil; the power beyond the stars Was now intent upon the consonance Of boughs and airs and earthy purities. We stood, hard-watching in the eastward dark A glowing pyre and vapour by Hill Sixty, And wondered who was mocking, Peace or War? The last train answered with far-dying echoes, And passed along the cutting; now the plain Lay in its first sleep, all its dwellings slept And called the night their own. The old law here Had come again with peasant tread to claim So full and unabated property That not one mark of a mad occupation Might be conceived. We only, watching, seemed The battlefield, if we were not deluded By dreaming ecstasies; could we have seen The ordinance of eternity reversed, And night disdained and dazzled into day, And day shot into gulfs of glaring gloom? Man in our time, and with our help, grew here A pale Familiar; here he struck the Sun, And for a season turned the Sun to blood; Many such nights as this his Witch and he Unmasked their metal, and with poisonous work Broke the fair sanctuary of this world's rest And circumvented God. But now misrule With all its burning rout had gone on the wind, Leaving us with the south-west breeze to whisper In bushes younger than the brows it cooled, Foreheads entrenched with all the argument Of what was once Time's vast compulsion, now Incapable to stir a weed or moth. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...D'ANNUNZIO by ERNEST HEMINGWAY 1915: THE TRENCHES by CONRAD AIKEN TO OUR PRESIDENT by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE HORSES by KATHARINE LEE BATES CHILDREN OF THE WAR by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE U-BOAT CREWS by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE RED CROSS NURSE by KATHARINE LEE BATES WAR PROFITS by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE UNCHANGEABLE by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN ALMSWOMEN by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |
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