e welter of
ruin and pain and filth and horror and death brought only a more superb
faith in the power of man's soul to rise above the hideous obsession of
his own devilries, to retain the vision of beauty through the riot of
foul things, of love through the tumult of hatreds, of life through the
infinity of death. True this was not a new power: poetry to be poetry
must always in some measure possess it. What was individual to the poets
was that this power of mastering actuality went along in them with the
fierce and eager immersion in it; the thrill of breathing the

'calm and serene air
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth,'

with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the
volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried
Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods
that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted
fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the
strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Shelley
overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made
one with Nature.

He visits the deserted home of his dead friend--

'Ah, but there was no need to call his name,
He was beside me now, as swift as light ...
For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes
Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love.
My body is the magic of the world,
And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.'

And so the undying dead

'Wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung,
To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.'

Further, this war poetry, while reflecting military things with a
veracity hardly known before, is yet rarely militant. We must not look
for explicit pacifist or international ideas; but as little do we find
jingo patriotism or hymns of hate. The author of the German hymn of hate
was a much better poet than anyone who tried an English hymn in the same
key, and the English poets who could have equalled its form were above
its spirit. Edith Cavell's dying words 'Patriotism is not enough' cannot
perhaps be paralleled in these poets, but they are continually
suggested. They do not say, in the phrase of the old cavalier poet, that
we should love England less if we loved not something else more, or that
something is wanting in our love for our co