The cruelty most dark, most desolate;
Thinking of the English dead—­“How can you dead,”
I muttered, “with your life and young joy shed,
How can you but in these new lands of life
Relume the fiery passion of old strife—­
Just anger, mortal hate, the natural scorn
Of men true-born for all things foully born?”
For I had thought that not death’s touch could still
In man’s clean spirit the hate of good for ill.

But now to see their shapes go lightly by
On those vast fields, clear ’neath the hueless sky,
With not one furious gesture, and (when seen
With but the broad dark hedgerow space between)
No eye’s disdain, no thin drawn face of grief,
But pondering calm or lightened look and brief
Smile almost gay;—­yet all seen in the air
That driv’n mist makes unreal everywhere—­
“So strange,” I breathed, “How can you English dead
Forget them for whose life your life was shed?”

It was no voice that answered, yet plain word
Less plain is than the unspoken that I heard,
As I lay there on the dry heap of fern
And watched them pass, mix, disappear and return,
And felt their mute speech into empty senses burn: 
“Earth’s is the strife.  The Heavenly Powers that sent
The gray globe spinning in the firmament,
The Heavenly Powers that soon or late will stay
The spinning, as a child that tires of play,
And globe by spent globe put forgot away
In some vast airless hollow:  could they see
Or seeing endure immortal misery
Made out of mortal, and undying hate
Earth’s perishing agonies perpetuate? 
O spirits unhappy, if from earth men brought
The mind’s disease, the sickness of mad thought! 
Sooner the Heavenly Powers would let them lie
Eternally unrising ’neath a sky
Arctic and lonely, where death’s starven wind
Raged full-delighted:—­sooner would those kind
Serenities man’s generation cast
Back into nothingness, than heaven should waste
With finite anguish infinitely prolonged
Until the Eternal Spring were stained and wronged. 
O, even the Heavenly Powers at such a breath
From mortal shores would fade and fade to death.”

—­Was it a voice or but a thought I heard,
Mine or another’s, in my boughs that stirred
Waking the leafy darkness of the mind? 
Was it a voice, or but a new-roused wind
That answered—­“O, I know, I know, I know! 
The oldest rivers into the full sea flow
And there are lost:  so everything is lost,
On midnight waves into oblivion tost. 
Yet—­the high passion, the pity, the joy and pride,
The righteousness for which these men have died,
The courage, the uncounted sacrifice,
The love and beauty, all that’s beyond all price;
That this, the immortal heart of mortal man,
Should be—­O tell me what, tell me again, again—­
Petals lost on the river of the years
When April sweetness pauses, fades and disappears! 
That this high Quarrel should be quenched in death
As some vexed petty plaint unworthy breath;
That the blood and the tears should never rise
Renewed, accusing in grave judgment skies ... 
Tell me again—­O, rather tell me not
Lest that ill telling never be forgot.”