Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/158

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with faintest taint of willow smoke,

and rough-hewn beams of darkened oak,

with unexpected steps and nooks,

and cases full of leather books—

soft water-colours that I love,

and in the bedrooms up above

large four-post beds and lots of air,

where I may lie without a care

and hear the rustle of the leaves

and starlings fighting in the eaves....

In his third poem, 'To My Brother,' he strikes a deeper note and, with the same habit of natural, apparently unpremeditated thought, shows a growth in the easy mastery of expression—

At first, when unaccustomed to death's sting,

I thought that, should you die, each sweetest thing,

each thing of any merit on this earth,

would perish also, beauty, love and mirth:

and that the world, despoiled and God-forsaken,

its glories gone, its greater treasures taken,

would sink into a slough of apathy

and there remain into eternity....

And when one day the aching blow did fall,

for many days I did not live at all....

I prayed that God might give me power to sever

your sad remembrance from my mind for ever.

'Never again shall I have heart to do

the things in which we took delight, we two.

I cannot bear the cross. Oh, to forget

the haunting vision of the past!' and yet