Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/335

 Rh

Great their happiness who seeing

Still with unbenighted eyes

Kin of theirs who gave them being,

Sun and earth that made them wise,

Die and feel their embers quicken

Year by year in summer time,

When the cotton grasses thicken

On the hills they used to climb.

Shall we also be as they be,

Mingled with our mother clay,

Or return no more, it may be?

Who has knowledge, who shall say?

Yet we hope that from the bosom

Of our shaggy father Pan,

When the earth breaks into blossom

Richer from the dust of man,

Though the high gods smite and slay us,

Though we come not whence we go,

As the host of Menelaus

Came there many years ago;

Yet the selfsame wind shall bear us

From the same departing place

Out across the Gulf of Saros

And the peaks of Samothrace:

We shall pass in summer weather,

We shall come at eventide,

Where the fells stand up together

And all quiet things abide;

Mixed with cloud and wind and river,

Sun-distilled in dew and rain,

One with Cumberland for ever

We shall go not forth again. Nowell Oxland