He puts into 'The Messines Road' that burning sympathy for France and resolve to right the wrongs she is enduring which fired so many of our men who have fallen in her defence, and none has paid her higher or more splendid tribute than he laid at the feet of her heroes in his song of 'Verdun.' There is a striking 'Ode of the Poet' in which he speaks of how, amid the hell of modern battle, the bard of these days laughs at Homer and the sheltered muse of Tennyson, and foresees that a new poet shall yet arise to sing the new Iliad, that he might be with us unknown at that hour, enduring all the agonies and horrors of a war that shall live for ever in the song he shall make when, in some future quietness, he can look back and remember.
Or haply in the silent womb of Time
Stirs the elected spirit to this hour,
He who will build for us the lofty rhyme,
Wearing a god-like vision as his dower,
Wise in the things that he has learned in Heav'n,
And wiser even than he who here has striven
For that he sees as the holy angels see
