untry if we wrong humanity in
its name. But the spirit which is embodied in these phrases breathes
through them; heroism matters more to them than victory, and they know
that death and sorrow and the love of kindred have no fatherland. They
'stand above the battle' as well as share in it, and they share in it
without ceasing to stand above it. The German is the enemy, they never
falter in that; and even death does not convert him into a friend. But
for this enemy there is chivalry, and pity, and a gleam, now and then,
of reconciling comradeship.

'He stood alone in some queer sunless place
Where Armageddon ends,'--

the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves
slain by his friend, the speaker. Their ghosts throng around him,--

'He stared at them, half wondering, and then
They told him how I'd killed them for his sake,
Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men:
At last he turned and smiled; smiled--all was well
Because his face would lead them out of hell.'

Finally, the poet himself glories in his act; he knows that he can beat
into music even the crashing discords that fill his ears; he knows too
that he has a music of his own which they cannot subdue or debase:

'I keep such music in my brain
No din this side of death can quell,
Glory exulting over pain,
And beauty garlanded in hell.'

To have found and kept and interwoven these two musics--a language of
unflinching veracity and one of equally unflinching hope and faith--is
the achievement of our war-poetry. May we not say that the possession
together of these two musics, of these two moods, springing as they do
from the blended grip and idealism of the English character, warrants
hope for the future of English poetry? For it is rooted in the greatest,
and the most English, of the ways of poetic experience which have gone
to the making of our poetic literature--the way, ultimately, of
Shakespeare, and of Wordsworth. But that temper of catholic fraternity
which finds the stuff of poetry everywhere does not easily attain the
consummate technique in expression of a rarer English tradition, that of
Milton, and Gray, and Keats. Beauty abounds in our later poets, but it
is a beauty that flashes in broken lights, not the full-orbed radiance
of a masterpiece. To enlarge the grasp of poetry over the field of
reality, to apprehend it over a larger range, is not at once to find
consummate expression