Poems (Elliott)/Three Hero-Poets
Three Hero-Poets
Three Hero-Poets
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, our honored Dean of American literature, has said that "war stopped literature, that war did not produce great poetry," but on the other hand, our Dean of American Poetesses, Edna D. Proctor, calls to mind the fact that, "war was the theme of the Iliad and war was the theme of the Odyssey"—two of the greatest Epics ever written. From the time of the Ancients to the present, war has so greatly stirred the hearts of men, that it must inevitably produce literature.
If this needed further or more abundant proof, we have evidence of it, in the fact that amidst the bloodiest and most terrible of all wars, known in the so-called age of civilization, three poets have arisen, simultaneously, as it were, from three different quarters of the globe, each of whom has had an opportunity to prove himself a great poet, or with the potentialities of greatness; which in the case of two, can never reach full fruition, on ac- count of their heroic deaths: Rupert Brooke, the young Englishman, who sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, February 28, 1915, in defense of his country, and died in the Aegean, April 23, 1915, at the age of twenty-eight; Alan Seeger, a young American, born in New York City, who, when the war was not yet three weeks old, enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France—
Came back the generous path of Lafayette,"
and set an example of brave self-sacrifice to the young men of America, which culminated in his heroic death in action, on July 4, 1916, at the age of twenty-eight, at Belloy-en-Santerre.
The last of the three, Robert W. Service, a man of forty-one , an Englishman by birth, a Canadian by adoption, is still living, and is driving a Red Cross ambulance "somewhere in France," having enlisted with the Medical Division of the French Army, almost at once, after the "world-war" began.
RUPERT BROOKE, it is said, was one of the handsomest Englishmen of his time. As his friends lovingly described him, he was a "golden young Apollo," the embodied spirit of youth and joy. "Hair of deep browny gold, smooth ruddy face, and eyes of living blue, he typified the 'Youth of the World,' and his moods were the radiance of an early summer's day. With him came a happy shining impression that he might have just come—that very moment—from another planet, one well within the solar system, but a little more like Utopia than ours."
I have said so much at length of him, because, it seems to me, that all these qualities of his personality are reflected in the poems he has left, especially in his earlier ones. Perhaps none better illustrates this than the one he has named "The Hill," breathing, as it does, the ecstasy of fife and youth:
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old"—"And when we die
All's over that is ours: and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here,
Life is our cry. 'We have kept the faith!" we said;
We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness! . . . .
When the war began, in his usual characteristic way, he exclaimed: "Well, if Armageddon's on, I suppose one should be there,"—a calm acceptance of the inevitable, so far as the war was concerned, an unquestioning surrender of himself to the cause of his Country.
His love of life resolved itself into his love of England, which found its voice in his Sonnets of 1914, each in itself a pearl of price, a gem in the golden crown of his fame. These five sonnets are the splendid fulfilment of the promise of Rupert Brooke's earlier poetry. In them he has reaped the first mature fruits of his genius and, in doing so, has written his own perfect epitaph.
His was a sincere and valiant spirit. His kindness of heart, his tolerance of all men were notable, the latter especially, when his youth is considered.
Joyous, fearless, ruled by high purpose, he serenely sacrificed himself for what he knew to be right and just, in the "hardest, cruellest and least rewarded of all the wars that men have fought."
We feel that we shall never truly know how great the loss has been to his country and to its literature, by the death of Rupert Brooke. "Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger."
He died in April of 1915, and is buried at Scyros, "amid the white and pinkish marble of the isle, the wild thyme and the poppies, near the green and blue waters," and though his resting place is known only by a little wooden cross, with his name, and the date of his birth and death, marked on it in black, he has left sure and unquestioned evidences of great genius, to live after him.
Strong, courageous, beautiful, vital, in love with life, but brave and ready to face death in the beloved cause, we find every characteristic of spirit and soul brought within the scope of our understanding and appreciation in these beautiful last words of his:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns at home."
We love to think that immortality will bring him all he craved and all he lost when he went so bravely out of life, in the very fulness of living.
Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them; as a mother, who
Has watched her children all the rich day through
Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
When children sleep, ere night."
ROBERT W. SERVICE, the only one among our three hero-poets who has not yet been called upon to give his life for his country, was born in England, in 1876. He was educated in Glasgow, but came to Canada in 1905 and held a position in the Canadian Bank of Commerce. He was, at one time, stationed in the Yukon Territory.
His first collection of verse, called the "Songs of a Sour-dough," depicting the life of the miners, and the hardened veterans of the North, in its wild freedom from all conventions, and the wonderful spell of that Northern country, was rejected by every publisher in the United States and Canada, until it came into the hands of the Briggs Publishing Company of Toronto, but has since made a fortune for its Author. It is now known under the more prepossessing title of "The Spell of the Yukon," and was followed, two years later, by the "Ballads of a Cheechako." His next book of poems was entitled "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone." He is the author of two novels also, the last, called "The Pretender" being largely autobiographical.
He has been called the "Canadian Kipling" and the "Kipling of the Arctic World," and, the likeness is most appropriate. Especially is it apparent in his two earliest volumes of verse. His virility, forcefulness and originality, his elemental intensity of feeling, his lack of hesitation at using the right word in the right place, no matter how rough or raw it may be, are the especial characterictics he has in common with Kipling.
In his "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone," this style is somewhat softened, and is then strongly reminiscent of our Bret Harte, the beloved of Americans, East and West. The feeling is the same, but the verse itself is more delicate in thought and expression.
But it is under the tragic inspiration of war, met face to face, day after day, in all its horrors and intensity of suffering, that his verse takes on the old ruggedness of his earlier volumes but with an added strength and maturity, an intensity of feeling and expression that only such scenes of horror, and the experiences of his daily life, under the Red Cross, can inspire.
Never did the full realization of the awfulness of the present world conflict come to me, until, in the "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man," I saw it, stripped of all sentiment and romance, the true Demon that it is.
Never in any work of any author, with which I am familiar, have humour and pathos been so closely or daringly intermingled, making his work human and real beyond all art. We forget his poetry in the wonder of his vivid reality. The "Foreword" of this volume, dedicated to the memory of his brother, Lieut. Albert Service, of the Canadian Infantry, who was killed in action in France, in August, 1916, is a tragic preface to a still more tragic collection of verse. There is no imaginative fancy, but grim and horrible fact, set down in rugged, imcompromising words, which make us shudder and grow pale.
The red resentment of the guns.
And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through the Zone of Hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait."
And with him we
War ever, ever can be right."
"The Haggis of Private McPhee," with its vein of comedy so closely mingled with tragedy, is never to be forgotten, once read. The two comrades who, both wounded, one blind, the other with both legs shot away, combining the resources that are left them, and thus making their way painfully back to camp, in order to taste the juicy plum pudding, which a sorrowing and thoughtful mother had sent, only to find their companion, whom they had left to guard the feast, in tears, and to hear the tragic story he has to tell, is a wonderful bit of realism; for in his blubbering Scotch, Wullie McNair breaks the news to them:
And there it lay steaming and savory hot,
When sudden I dooked at the fleech of a shell,
And it—drapped on the haggis and dinged it tae hell.'
The sequel, so out of proportion to all the great issues of the war, yet served its good turn against the enemy, for:
And up from the trenches like lions they leapt,
And on through the nicht like a torrent they swept,
On. on wi' their bayonets thirstin' before!
On, on tae the foe wi' a rush and a roar!
And wild to the welkin their battle-cry rang,
And doon an the Boches like tigers they sprang;
And there wisna a man but had death in his ee,
For the thoot o' the haggis o' Private McPhee."
In "A Song of Winter Weather," the great physical misery endured in the war, aside from all its horror and the suffering of the wounded, is brought home to us in vivid verse. We see the soldiers, marching kneedeep in "the mud, the rain and the cold", with no hope of cheerful campfire awaiting them at the end of the day.
Are the pains and the woes
Of the rain the cold and the mud."
The gruesome horror of the word-picture "On the Wire" haunts us; the picture of a wounded soldier, entangled in the barbed wire in "No Man's Land," between the trenches, where it is impossible to reach the wounded. There he suffers and thirsts under the burning sun, and the drenching dews, until he finds welcome release in death.
In contrast to the two last mentioned poems, what could be more tender, more sweet, more pathetic, than his picture of "Fleurette," who did not hesitate to be- stow the comfort of her kiss upon the soldier, shattered by a bomb he had smothered in the trenches, to save his men.
Ranking with this, in the same quality of pathos, is that wonderful picture of his, which he has called "Grand Pere," the name given to their beloved General Joffre, by his soldiers. This must, like all, in fact, be read to be appreciated, for the greatest prose ever written would seem feeble and ineffectual beside his strong and pregnant verse.
In the last poem to which I wish to call especial atptention, his appeal to our faith, even in the midst of all this horror of bloodshed, is sweet and simple as a child's and hope is born to us in the reading of the lines:
The power that shaped the strife shall end the strife;
Then let's bow down before the Unknown Will;
Fight on, believing all is well with life;
Seeing within the worst of War's red rage
The gleam, the glory of the Golden Age."
ALAN SEEGER was the embodiment of all that is best in life; a man of high vitality and an overflowing joy in existence; a man keen for great experiences and high and noble adventure, which discovers itself again and again in all he has written. In a sonnet, written two months before his death, he has given us a personal picture, which greatly endears him to us:
I frolicked, poor of purse, but light of heart.
And lived in strict devotion all along
To my three idols—Love and Arms and Song."
He was a vivid and virile soul, alive to the beauty and wonder of the universe, who accepted life as a glorious gift and with joy lived it out to the fullest.
It has been said of him, that, "of all the poets who have died young, none has died so happily;" and when we remember the sad and disappointing lives of Keats, and Shelley, and of Byron, we cannot but feel that this is true; for he died, as he would have wished to die, for the country whose cause he had espoused, in the heat of conflict and in the moment of victory.
His "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France," which he was to have read before the statutes of Lafayette and of Washington in Paris, on Decoration Day, May 30, 1916, had his leave of absence come in time, is prophetic of his own death, when he expresses the hope that, "accents of ours were in the fierce melee," and says:
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours."
It was his, as he wished it—"the rare privilege of dying well," for it is known that, as he lay mortally wounded, after the first onslaught, under the fire of six German machine men, he cheered the next advancing line of his companions and urged them on to victory with an English marching song, and his last failing breath.
The "Ode" before referred to, is one of the finest productions of his pen and brain—his whole soul and heart were in it—and it is the more remarkable in that it was completed in two days while he was engaged in the hardest physical labor in the trenches. In it he wrote his own best epitaph.
The value of his work can never be fully or rightly estimated. Of the three contemporaries, herein considered, he seems to me to rank highest in true and delicate poetic feeling. His passion for beauty revealed itself every- where, through his great gift of song. The spirit of Romance was strong in its appeal for him; he dreamed it, he found beautiful expression for it, he lived it, from glad choice, even to the "great adventure" which Death invited him to share.
Perhaps it was because, throughout his life, he was surrounded by beauty; first, in his life on Staten Island, later in his sojourn amidst the sunlight and splendor and romantic environments of Mexico, and still later in his school days in Tarrytown, surrounded by the rugged beauties of the Hudson. A short period he spent in the New Hampshire hills, again in Southern California, and all these beautiful regions find a place in his poems, at least the influence of their beauty, to which he was so keenly susceptible.
His earlier work, under these influences, is more imaginative, more contemplative, more serene. Under the influence of the last vivid experiences of his life, it grows in strength and in concentration, and loses the imaginative in the real, the abstract in the concrete of every day life, of hardship and suffering, but it is glorified by his pen and by his heroic devotion, till we lose sight of sense in soul, and that the soul of a poet and hero.
He is everywhere sincere, and everywhere true to the best and highest standards of literature and above all scorns the pose of "vers libre," the "art nouveau" of poesy, as he does everything that does not meet the high ideals of the true poet. He writes from the imagination of an idealist and from his own vivid experiences. His love of life was so intense and so real that we are unconsciously inspired and uplifted by it, to a keener feeling than we have known before. He himself says:
I gloated on existence, Earth to me
Seemed all sufficient, and my sojourn there
One trembling opportunity for joy."
We are glad to know that New York City, which must constantly meet the arraignment of lack of heart, and lack of sentiment, has produced so true a genius.
His long residence in Paris, the city of his heart, made fealty to France an impelling desire when the need came.
But yielding ourselves to the Master hand,
Each in his part, as best he could,
We played it through as the Author planned."
In his own words, written to his mother, amidst the roar of cannon, he says: "In this universe, strife and sternness play as big a part, as love and tenderness, and cannot be shirked by one whose will it is to rule his life in accordance with the cosmic forces he sees in play about him." It was his philosophy of life.
Everywhere, in the hardest kind of work, and surrounded by the horror and suffering in the trenches, he yet notes the beauty of the autumn weather, the sunny days and the bright coloring of the foliage after the first frosty nights, the grandeur of the starlit sky when on picket duty and the lovely landscape spreading out before him by day, even to the distant snow-capped mountains. This was his poetry of life.
If I were to choose the one of his poems most characteristic of him, it would be that one which, with the "Ode," must live, it seems to me, as long as the memory of the present war, which will be for all time. It is his "I have a Rendezvous with Death," which is too exquisite, in its sad and tender and heroic beauty to be quoted except in its entirety:
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring conies back with a rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill.
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow flowers appear.
Pillowed in silk and scented down
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep;
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath
Where hushed awakenings are dear—
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true—
I shall not fail that rendezvous."