ideas have had less weight in councils of war and parliaments of peace. Commerce has been permitted to oppress and ambition to outrage it to any extent.
But let us return to the poem I first cited. Lieutenant Harvey, who won the D.C.M. as lance-corporal, was allowed by the German authorities to send it and a little volume of others home from the prison camp at Gütersloh. Many judges would not admit that his poem is a rival to Flecker's, and the last couplet does weaken its effect; but then Flecker weakened his by two stanzas which I have not quoted. Lt. Harvey's volume gives proof of a varied and powerful soul; but it peeps at us from a prison of trivial amusement, banal tricks and rhymes, things that Flecker was all his short poet-life at conscious war with, staving them further and further back from his small garden of verse; whereas Harvey hardly seems conscious that they confine and baffle the wings of his Pegasus. The gleams of pure poetry that flash past the bars of his everyday mentality are not alone passages of felicity, but there are also fine inevitable poem-shapes, marred in execution—not so much, as in Sorley's case, from lack of time to finish; no, rather as though a strange, insensitive, surface-personality intervened and "gambolled from the matter" in repeating what had been conceived. When I first read his volume I said, "No, I cannot write about this man," and laid it aside for weeks; then I happened to open it at the lines I have quoted and immediately began to search for other signs of power in the mass of smart or pretty trifles, and I found a few. He addresses a fallen comrade—
"Swift-footed, fleeter yet
Of heart. Swift to forget
The petty spite that life or men could show you:
Your last long race is won,
But beyond the sound of gun
You laugh and help men onward—if I know you."
