Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/213

Rh lyrics as 'For City Folk' and 'A Soldier in Hospital,' and 'The Rainbow,' written while he was in the trenches in France, is filled with a limitless gratitude for the common gifts of life and a sure faith in the new day that burgeons at the heart of all the darkness:

I watch the white dawn gleam

To the thunder of hidden guns;

I hear the hot shells scream

Through skies as sweet as a dream

Where the silver dawnbreak runs;

And stabbing of light

Scorches the virginal white;

But I feel in my being the old, high, sanctified thrill,

And I thank the gods that the dawn is beautiful still.

From death that hurtles by

I crouch in the trench day-long,

But up to a cloudless sky

From the ground where our dead men lie

A brown lark soars in song.

Through the tortured air,

Rent by the shrapnel's flare,

Over the troubleless dead he carols his fill,

And I thank the gods that the birds are beautiful still.

Where the parapet is low

And level with the eye,

Poppies and cornflowers grow,

And the corn sways to and fro

In a pattern 'gainst the sky;