'that Love its life in death can find'; and his requiem over the dead is a rejoicing:
For these like some great planet spheric-whirled
Have swung into the orbit of a greater world.
These topped the hill of Youth; stood on the verge
Of vision; saw within the furthest star
Spiritual presences, Love's own avatar;
These the twin worlds of soul and flesh did merge
Into a dream, a consciousness that stole
Around their spirits like an aureole.
He hails the dead as
Youth triumphant, greater than his fate;
and elsewhere exults that he and his comrades, dying, will have given their all, even their heritage of youth, that the reign of humanity shall be restored:
We march to death singing our deathless songs,
Like knights invested with a purpose high,
and foresees how the youth of the years to be
Will hear our phantom armies marching by,
and learn from them how to die for liberty.
No militarism is here, nor in any of the poems I have read by these soldiers; no strut of the goose-step, no taste for slaughter nor lust of conquest for its own sake, nor any of the cheap, dazzling
