Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/34

 ANTI-CLIMAX.

embers crackle on the hearth. The dark

Invades the homely cottage living room.

Across the chequered window-pane I mark

An acre of the sky with stars a-bloom.—

And I have ventured many a wan surmise

To-day on life and death, and there has crept

A sadness on me from the sunset skies

To think how long old dreams of mine have slept,

And how the glory of the past fades out,

Those mighty apparitions that appeared

In days more grandiose, and how a drought

Of faith has left our spirits bruised and seared.

For I have loved, how deeply have I loved,

The haunted spots of faith and poetry,

Have looked on Delphi's rock, and musing roved

By Rydalwater and by Domremy;

And I have known the august moods of war,

When we deployed upon the breathless heights

Of man's experience and laid by a store

Of countless dawns and noons and starry nights

Touched with Homeric action on far fronts

In company with the heroic dead,

Living a thousand lives in those few months

Whose pageantry to-day, alas, is fled.

And I remember old simplicities

And whitenesses of soul that mock me now,

And feel remorse for mediocrities

And spurn the gods to whom peace bids me bow.

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