Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/36

 36 This tendency is well illustrated by Lieutenant Joseph Lee's German Prisoners; the late Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley's sonnet, To Germany ; Corporal Alexander Robertson's "Thou Shalt Love Thine Enemies," and Captain James Norman Hall's Out of Flanders. Again, the poet at the Front, unless he be a determined Realist, often turns impatiently away from the attempt to represent actual warfare, and tries instead to visualize some emotional antidote. As Lord Crewe has discerningly said, "It seems that the soldier who is also a writer is as likely to set his mind on green fields and spring flowers as on the bloody drama in which he is an actor, and to tune his lyre accordingly. . . . So that among the verse written by soldiers in this war it is not surprising to find as many poems recalling loves of home and memories of country days as proclaiming the delight of battle, or even the loftier summons of patriotism and duty. Some of this work of to-day, as we all know, transcends the lyrical faculty which is the frequent appanage of youth, and reaches the level of true poetry; some of it is made sacred by the death of the writer, and cannot be coldly weighed in the balance."

Whether or not, then, he be privileged to see war with the eye of sense, and to share its rigours and ardours with fellow-soldiers, the first duty of the war-poet toward his art is to be a poet, to discover the timeless and placeless in the momentary and parochial, and to bring back to us a true and moving report of the experience and behaviour of the human spirit during its recurrent struggles with its own worser self. If he be on active service, the poet will, like Archilochus, the more loyally render unto Ares the things that are Ares', because he continues to offer unto Apollo the things that are Apollo's. If he be involved in other than the military activities of war, he may have even the greater need to preach to himself, as to his readers, the gospel of Art, and to carry his priesthood pure through moments of civic dejection or gusty passion. In either case, it will be his ultimate desire as a poet to develop and express (even though indirectly) a poet's philosophy of war. And his philosophy