Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/18

 Whereby we grope and sound and prove

Whether some circumambient Love

Greet and reward our motion to aspire.

Muse on each acted part;

Forgotten exultations, rage, and smart,

Their faith's extinguished fire,

And little triumphs that none think upon,

And protests smothered in oblivion.

Muse on this epitaph that meets the eye,

Strangely familiar in its alien tongue,

"These for our homes did die,"—

Two brothers loved of nameless folk, who won

This as earth's final comment at Verdun,

In that stentorian month whose havoc flung

Its hundred thousands down to Acheron;

In that inordinate reaping

Of these our fields beneath

When twilight was congested with the hosts

Of death's dim, swarming envoys bent upon

Prodigious inroads down life's fertile coasts,

Its virgin prairies sweeping

In far incursions where no scythe had shone;

Till earth was cumbered with the oppressive weight

Of such a garnering underneath the sun,

Such high-heaped sheaves of death;

Till one by one,

Borne off across the stars in phantom state,

Death's groaning wains conveyed

The great ingathering to the realms of shade,

And throngs unwonted choked the Stygian gate.

...Races of men, co-heirs of earth's duress,

Children of night, and orphans of the void,

Ringed 'round with menace and with mystery,

Condemned at birth to death in loneliness,

Proscribed and hunted, trampled and destroyed

By the blind furies of the earth and sea— 12