POETRY AND THE WAR

In the beginning and through to the present it is poetry and not prose that has recorded the soul-stirring events in the life of the individual and the tribe and the nation. Because it lacks the rhythmic movement suggestive of emotional excitement and because it is primarily the medium of every-day intercourse, prose cannot express such intense feeling as can poetry. Persons without poetic gifts show their sense of the superiority of the older form by dropping into verse when they wish to be particularly effective in the expression of their emotions. This was illustrated recently in the case of a young man named Raymond, who was leaving his native town for one of the cantonments. Before his departure his friends presented him with a purse accompanied by a farewell letter, in which they wished him good luck and begged him to write to them. All this in matter-of-fact prose. But when the writer of the letter came to the heart of the message, the voicing of the sentiments of his fellows, he felt impelled to resort to verse:

So long, Ray, our old friend,

We will soon be with you to the end;

But we hope before over there you roam,
That we will see you safe at home.

But the writer

Now this is not poetry; it is not even free verse. thought it was a more emotional utterance than was possible in plain prose, and he doubtless labored over it with all the infinite pains that go according to some definitions to make up a work of genius. And I have no doubt that the aforesaid Raymond appreciated the poetical effort as much as he did the financial accompaniment.

This being so, and poetry being the natural expression of emotional excitement, we should expect a great mass of poetry as a result of the tremendous events of this war. And we know that thousands of poems have been written. Several anthologies have been collected and not a day passes on which new poems are not appearing in great numbers. But is it real poetry or only rhyming lines like those inscribed above? Mr. John Mase

field, probably our greatest living poet, said recently that no literature was being produced to-day; that there had been neither time nor opportunity for the slow ripening of reflection on experience which is necessary for the production of literature. He would say, doubtless, that great poetry cannot be produced in the heat of the conflict, that the poet's feelings are so torn by the agony of the strife that he cannot think of them calmly or deeply, and still less can he put them into poetic speech. When one is in a rage or is overwrought by passion of any kind, one is usually inarticulate or is reduced to meaningless and promiscuous profanity. It is always later that one thinks of the scathing retort; it is only when the mind has resumed its calm that a man can convey in poetic words any idea of the feelings that were surging in his breast. The peace of mind and serenity of soul that enable the poet to hear amid the conflicting tumults of the world the still, sad music of humanity are not possible while he is an active agent in the midst of them. He cannot write poetry, one would suppose, while his ears are assailed by the roar of the guns and the groans of the dying. And yet, as a matter of fact, very excellent poetry has been written not only by men and women at home but also by soldiers actually in the front lines. How can this be?

There are several reasons. In the first place, calm reflection is not entirely dependent upon time and place. Just as Bairnsfather has drawn some of the funniest cartoons of the war from the very midst of the fighting, so many a poet has reflected calmly upon certain aspects and incidents of the war with the shells eternally screaming overhead. The soldier at the front is often more composed than his dear ones at home. Again, the poets have not attempted to envisage the whole conflict, to write, as it were, its Iliad. To do so would be as impossible a hundred years hence as now. No one has ever attempted to put into verse the record of the Napoleonic wars or our Civil War. siege of Troy was a mere outpost affair compared with this war, even if it did last ten years, and it took twenty-four books for its narration. The poets have concerned themselves with what one might call their own individual sectors of the front, with what they themselves are personally interested in or what comes under their

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own observation. It is some striking incident, some grim episode, some touching or appalling situation, some herioc action, some splendid sacrifice, something that never got into the dispatches or something that did, it is such matters that have been transmuted into poetry. These incidents or situations have made an immediate appeal to the emotions of the poets and did not need the calm reflection of years in order that they might find expression in literature.

Another reason for the excellence of the poetry of this war lies in the fact that it is inspired by a great moral idea. Never before in the history of the world have the spiritual issues of a great conflict been so perfectly clear. The war of the Revolution and the Civil War, though essentially struggles for moral principles, did not so vividly and concretely present the issue as this fight against organized murder. The national sense of justice may be mightily stirred by the imposition of iniquitous taxes or the doctrine of State rights or the institution of human slavery, but it is not so profoundly moved as by the wanton slaughter of innocent men, women, and children, or by a system of destruction in violation of all the laws of God and man. Such recent wars as the Boer and the Spanish-American can hardly be said to have been moral conflicts to the extent of arousing a nation to a white heat in a holy cause. There were

a great many people in England who had grave doubts as to the justice of taking up arms against the Boers, and others who condemned it as an absolute wrong. There were some Americans who questioned the conduct of the United States in declaring war on Spain, and the great mass of Americans looked upon the whole affair as a sort of punitive expedition to teach the Spaniards to remember the Maine. And neither nation produced any verse of a high order in celebration of its war or any of its incidents. The battle hymn of the Republic in the Spanish war seems to have been "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night," and it about reflects the seriousness of the average citizen on that occasion. But in the present fight, from the day that Beligum was invaded, there has been a clear vision of the horror of that deed and all that it connotes, as well as an insistent demand that Germany be punished for her outrageous

crime. The progress of the struggle has but drawn more sharply the lines between the forces of evil as operative in Teutonic frightfulness and those of righteousness as embodied in the great democracies of the world. The voice of the poet is the voice of the national conscience after centuries of political freedom and moral enlightenment. It is actually the voice of God.

This poetry is therefore the product of the time and responds to the instincts and aspirations of the English and American peoples. It is the spontaneons overflow of powerful emotions, which have been born of the multitudinous experiences of this war. It covers a wide range of subjects, from the emotion inspired by the deed or the fact to a different conception of the meaning of life, death, and immortality than appears in the older poetry. It seldom tries to penetrate the mystery why this war should be,-that truly calls for the slow ripening of reflection on experience,—but it does seek to show how man responds to the awful fact of the war. It would reveal the soul in the face of the greatest catastrophe that has ever visited this earth. This being so, it is perhaps worth while to study this poetry to see wherein it is of a kind with earlier verse and wherein it strives to express things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

There are a goodly number of poems celebrating the heroic deed, poems that hold their own beside Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," and that record valor in battle against tremendous odds. Such is Wilfred Campbell's "Langemarck at Ypres," in which he tells in spirited verse of the resistance the Canadians made against the first gas attack of the Huns:

Ringed round, hemmed in, and back to back

They fought there under the dark,

And won for Empire, God, and Right,
At grim, red Langemarck.

Or we have Herbert Kaufman's "The Hell-Gate at Soissons," which puts into the mouth of Darino, the poet of the Comédie Française, the story of the twelve Englishmen who died one after the other in their effort to blow up a bridge, only the twelfth succeeding just before he was shot down. The relief of the

Twenty-first by the Guards, Conan Doyle tells in excellent verse. The men were hard pressed,—

Fighting alone, worn to the bone,

But sticking it-sticking it yet.

No hope was in sight and death was all about them, when the Guards appeared. How they cheered them! and the Guards had

A trifle of swank and dash,
Cool as a home parade,
Twinkle and glitter and flash,
Flinching never a shade,

With the shrapnel right in their face
Doing their Hyde Park stunt,
Keeping their swing at an easy pace,

Arms at the trail, eyes front!

Man, it was great to see!

Man, it was fine to do!

It's a cot and a hospital ward for me,
But I'll tell 'em in Blighty, wherever I be,
How the Guards came through.

These poems suggest many in earlier periods of our literature, Macaulay's "Horatius," Tennyson's "Revenge," Drayton's "Agincourt," speeches in Shakespeare's Henry V, and in sheer admiration for glorious deeds they do not differ essentially from what has already been done. It is, however, significant that whereas such poems are the characteristic product of former wars, they are not so of this war. Now it is the cause rather than the event, the moral rather than the romantic and heroic aspects of the struggle that stir the imagination of the modern poet. The romance of the old wars has gone with them. No more do we think with Othello of

. . . . the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality,

Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!

It has all vanished before the armed motors, the "tanks," and the grim business of the trenches. Even the ships, which have been the glory of English wars and the inspiration of English verse, have now, after the first few weeks of accounting for the German navy, settled down to the unromantic task of keeping