Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/178

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140
For Remembrance

seemed slight but became septic, and he died three days later. Shortly afterwards his brother was killed in Mesopotamia, and they were the only sons of their mother, who was a widow.

His earlier poems are filled with the sweetness of common life, or the dreams and glamour of old romance, the longest and one of the best of them, 'Glastonbury,' steeped in the light and atmosphere of far-off days, being an Arthurian legend of the repentance of Lancelot. In 'A Preface for a Tale I never Told' he says that in it there shall be

No song
That men shall sing in battle and remember
When they are old and grey, beside the fire:
Only a story gathered from the hills,
And the wind crying of forgotten days....

Of the beauty and the happiness of the 'old quiet things' of life all his poetry was fashioned till the war broke through his dreams and, with 'We who have Bowed Ourselves to Time,' he bade farewell to them:

...We who have led, by gradual ways,
Our placid life to sterner days,