Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/145

Rh of men which pious hands have buried are daily disinterred by plunging shells. S—— itself is merely a heap of bricks and stones, and it reeks to heaven of mortality. Do you wonder that, reading Wordsworth this afternoon in a clearing of the unpolluted woodlands, and marking the lovely faded colours on the wings of hibernated butterflies, and their soft motions, I felt a disgust, even to sickness, of the appalling wickedness of war. Sometimes one has great need of a strength which is not in one's own power to use, but is a grace of God.'

He has put something of those abhorrent sights and the feeling they stirred in him into one of the few poems he wrote during the war, and it contrasts sharply with the beauty and tenderness that are in his earlier verse—in the gracefully fanciful 'Aphrodite in the Cloister,' in the charming song of love, 'After Evensong'—

Bend over me in dreams;

Sweep with thy loosened hair

My lips, as though soft streams

Lavished cool wavelets there....