of
constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another
popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes
it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him,

For I had the share of life that might have filled a century,
Before its fourth in time had passed me by.
[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.]

A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects,

... For my thirty years,
Dashed with sun and splashed with tears,
Wan with revel, red with wine,
Other wiser happier men
Take the full three score and ten.
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with
recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily
Bronte, of whom it is written:

They live not long of thy pure fire composed;
Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Bronte_.]

Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness.
Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death

Far from the trembling throng
Whose souls are never to the tempest given.
[Footnote: _Adonais_.]

With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis
Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home
to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong
for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are
screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream
about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his
article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne
speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has
written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is
nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense
must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less
wild-winged."

It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or
to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to
mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with
regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not
wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a
departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to
overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom ti