Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/225

Rh been moved to sing of its sadness, its pain, its tragedy, to speculate on it philosophically, to hail it as the honour that shall crown the memory of the brave, or to fling a proud defiance in its face, or to welcome it and hymn its praise as if they looked to rise upon the tomb like triumph on a pedestal. The too-constant presence of Death and the desire for respite is the burden of Victor Ratcliffe's 'Optimism':

This is the simple, eternal confession of faith that though the winter is here and has put out the sun and laid the world in ruins, we have only to be patient and