Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/292

 292

Till Gable clears his iron sides

And Bowfell's wrinkled front appears,

And Scawfell's clustered might derides

The menace of the marching years.

The tall men of that noble land

Who share such high companionship,

Are scorners of the feeble hand,

Contemners of the faltering lip.

When all the ancient truths depart,

In every strait that men confess,

Stands in the stubborn Cumbrian heart

The spirit of that steadfastness.

In quiet valleys of the hills

The humble grey stone crosses lie,

And all day long the curlew shrills

And all day long the wind goes by.

But on some stifling alien plain

The flesh of Cumbrian men is thrust

In shallow pits, and cries in vain

To mingle with its kindred dust.

Yet those make death a little thing

Who know the settled works of God,

Winds that heard Latin watchwords ring

From ramparts where the Roman trod.

Stars that beheld the last King's crown

Flash in the steel-grey mountain tarn,

And ghylls that cut the live rock down

Before Kings ruled in Ispahan.

And when the sun at even dips

And Sabbath bells are sad and sweet,

When some wan Cumbrian mother's lips

Pray for the son they shall not greet,

As falls that sudden dew of grace

Which makes for her the riddle plain,

The South wind blows to our own place,

And we shall see the hills again. ("Edward Melbourne") William Noel Hodgson