Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/37

 Rh will be both stern and kind, both just and magnanimous. He will not quarrel about professional or political attitudes toward war. He will not quarrel about attitudes at all. He will see war now as a great and gallant adventure; now as an inevitable molecular movement; now as the abomination of desolation; now, perhaps, as Rowland Thirlmere sees it in Nocturne:—

Sometimes war will seem to the poet, despite its evils, to offer an ennobling spiritual enfranchisement in the face of danger and death, to encourage the soul to renounce the petty timidities and cautions to which the prosaic life of getting on in the world teaches men to conform. The man of war, he will feel, has an altogether unusual opportunity to realize himself, to cleanse and heal himself through the mastering of his physical fears; through the facing of his moral doubts; through the re-examination of whatever thoughts he may have possessed, theretofore, about life and death and the universe; and through the quietly unselfish devotion he owes to the welfare of his fellows and to the cause of his native land. Sometimes the poet will persuade himself that war is, in its essence, merely the noun that corresponds to the adjective dynamic, that it means effort, adventure, burden, growth, struggle, work, indeed the maintenance and development of one's being, that it includes every expression of ideas in the service of knowledge and wisdom, and that it is in this sense an inalienable condition