Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/347

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Suppose I had sought seclusion in the dim far lands of exile,

Over the leagues of foam;

And there in warmth and safety, far from the din and roar,

Had built me another home!

Surely, had I done this, in the dark still hours of night,

I should have woke from sleep, with my soul in great affright,

Hearing the cry of innocent blood

From over the Eastern wave,

Voices of little children

That I could but would not save.

But beyond and above even pity for the foully slaughtered children and women of Belgium rose the stronger, holier call to save the sanctuaries of civilisation from the destroyer, and so shatter his power for destruction that the peace of the world and the rights of the weak should never go in fear of it again—a call that rings like a tocsin in some of the noblest poetry of the war.

Though the delightfully frivolous and satirical things in the Poems and Parodies of Professor Kettle justify the prefatory description of him as 'a genial cynic,' what the preface says further of his