Whereby we grope and sound and prove
Whether some circumambient Love
Greet and reward our motion to aspire.
Muse on each acted part;
Forgotten exultations, rage, and smart,
Their faith's extinguished fire,
And little triumphs that none think upon,
And protests smothered in oblivion.
Muse on this epitaph that meets the eye,
Strangely familiar in its alien tongue,
"These for our homes did die,"—
Two brothers loved of nameless folk, who won
This as earth's final comment at Verdun,
In that stentorian month whose havoc flung
Its hundred thousands down to Acheron;
In that inordinate reaping
Of these our fields beneath
When twilight was congested with the hosts
Of death's dim, swarming envoys bent upon
Prodigious inroads down life's fertile coasts,
Its virgin prairies sweeping
In far incursions where no scythe had shone;
Till earth was cumbered with the oppressive weight
Of such a garnering underneath the sun,
Such high-heaped sheaves of death;
Till one by one,
Borne off across the stars in phantom state,
Death's groaning wains conveyed
The great ingathering to the realms of shade,
And throngs unwonted choked the Stygian gate.
...Races of men, co-heirs of earth's duress,
Children of night, and orphans of the void,
Ringed 'round with menace and with mystery,
Condemned at birth to death in loneliness,
Proscribed and hunted, trampled and destroyed
By the blind furies of the earth and sea—
12
