t has only two
rhymes, but these recur only four times, and the liberty of the sestet
tempers its despotism,--which I thought a pretty phrase. He pointed
out the dangers inherent in a restricted rhyme, and cited the case of
Browning, the great rhymster, who was prone to resort to any rhyme, and
frequently ended in absurdity, finding it easier to make a new verse
than to make an end.

At great length--but the December evenings in Flanders are long, how
long, O Lord!--this Sapper officer demonstrated the skill with which the
rhymes are chosen. They are vocalized. Consonant endings would spoil the
whole effect. They reiterate O and I, not the O of pain and the Ay
of assent, but the O of wonder, of hope, of aspiration; and the I of
personal pride, of jealous immortality, of the Ego against the Universe.
They are, he went on to expound, a recurrence of the ancient question:
"How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come?" "How shall I
bear my light across?" and of the defiant cry: "If Christ be not raised,
then is our faith vain."

The theme has three phases: the first a calm, a deadly calm, opening
statement in five lines; the second in four lines, an explanation,
a regret, a reiteration of the first; the third, without preliminary
crescendo, breaking out into passionate adjuration in vivid metaphor, a
poignant appeal which is at once a blessing and a curse. In the closing
line is a satisfying return to the first phase,--and the thing is done.
One is so often reminded of the poverty of men's invention, their
best being so incomplete, their greatest so trivial, that one welcomes
what--this Sapper officer surmised--may become a new and fixed mode of
expression in verse.

As to the theme itself--I am using his words: what is his is mine; what
is mine is his--the interest is universal. The dead, still conscious,
fallen in a noble cause, see their graves overblown in a riot of poppy
bloom. The poppy is the emblem of sleep. The dead desire to sleep
undisturbed, but yet curiously take an interest in passing events. They
regret that they have not been permitted to live out their life to its
normal end. They call on the living to finish their task, else they
shall not sink into that complete repose which they desire, in spite
of the balm of the poppy. Formalists may protest that the poet is not
sincere, since it is the seed and not the flower that produces sleep.
They might as well object that the poet has no right to