Page:Poems of the Great War - Cunliffe.djvu/283

 ��But by the pathless sea, by peak and plain,

Bright-eyed, stern-lipped, all day, all night, they go

Forth as a fire that snatches and devours

Wind-withered woods, so go they swift and fell,

Warring with principalities and powers.

Hunting through space the swart, old bands of Hell ;

And all the sounding causeways of the spheres Ring like white iron with the rhythmic tread

Of these and their innumerable peers ;

But most round England muster England's dead,

Round England cradled in her roaring seas.

With Arctic snows white-girdled, bathed in suns

Asian and Australasian, there go these ; And where one solitary trader nms

His English keel, and where one lonely sword Glimmers for England, one unsleeping brain

Watches and works for England, thitherward Gather the bright souls of her servants slain

For her, and lock their shimmering ranks, and sweep Round England's child as sweeps the northern gale

Round some stark pine-tree on the moorland steep, And from the flash and rattle of their mail

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