Page:Poems Elliott.djvu/74



In his own words, written to his mother, amidst the roar of cannon, he says: "In this universe, strife and sternness play as big a part, as love and tenderness, and cannot be shirked by one whose will it is to rule his life in accordance with the cosmic forces he sees in play about him." It was his philosophy of life.

Everywhere, in the hardest kind of work, and surrounded by the horror and suffering in the trenches, he yet notes the beauty of the autumn weather, the sunny days and the bright coloring of the foliage after the first frosty nights, the grandeur of the starlit sky when on picket duty and the lovely landscape spreading out before him by day, even to the distant snow-capped mountains. This was his poetry of life.

If I were to choose the one of his poems most characteristic of him, it would be that one which, with the "Ode," must live, it seems to me, as long as the memory of the present war, which will be for all time. It is his "I have a Rendezvous with Death," which is too exquisite, in its sad and tender and heroic beauty to be quoted except in its entirety: