Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/163

Rh one who, up to the very end, was everything that we mean by healthy boyhood.'

He received his commission in the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers in June 1917, and went soon after to France. All the poems in his book, Moods and Tenses, were written between October 1914 and June 1918; one gathers that he wrote other and some earlier verse which his own judgment and that of his editor excluded. Though in the first half of his book there are fanciful little songs on the happier things of earth, his thoughts turn again and again to the pity and mystery of death and the evil of war; but in what he wrote of these later, after he was out in the battle line, there is a vivider sense of reality, a growth and sudden maturity of feeling, of knowledge, of imaginative sympathy. 'The shock of war—though for a time it killed in him all desire to write—sent his power along new channels.' He found himself, as a poet, in 'the grisly experience of the Western front—though he hated it, as all good men must hate such hateful things,' and he shaped the tragedy of