Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/286

230 more in his verse that the 'horror of arms endlessly thundering, piety, justice, valor and royalty' which Chapman found in Homer's. He has not the simple directness of the story-tellers of the ancient world, because he has not their simple faith in the glory of war nor in the warrior as the loftiest of possible heroes. He relegates the supreme war-maker to his place in the universal scheme of things, puts him in relation to the spiritual significance of life and human progress, and recognises that he merely fulfils his destined function,

The pomp and circumstance of war are the business of both The Dynasts and the Iliad, but Hardy has a habit of looking through the dazzling pageantry to the underlying wrong and individual suffering, to the squalor, the cruelty, the tragedy, the stupid and piteous waste of it all, and shows you his defeated hero at the last, stripped of his childish splendours and dignities, and foreseeing the coming of a day when, despite the showy and noisy wonders he has done: