et!

"Oh, my songs never sung,
And my plays to darkness blown!
I am still so young, so young,
And life was my own."

But this mood soon passes, and is merged in the humoristic and fantastic
elation characteristic of this buoyant writer, whose whim it is to meet
the tragedy not mournfully but boisterously. Where by most of the
soldier-bards the subjective manner is a little over-done, it is
impossible not to welcome so objective a writer as Captain Graves, from
whose observations of the battle of La Bassee I quote an episode:--

THE DEAD FOX HUNTER

"We found the little captain at the head;
His men lay well aligned.
We touched his hand, stone-cold, and he was dead,
And they, all dead behind,
Had never reached their goal, but they died well;
They charged in line, and in the same line fell.

"The well-known rosy colours of his face
Were almost lost in grey.
We saw that, dying and in hopeless case,
For others' sake that day
He'd smothered all rebellious groans: in death
His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth.

"For those who live uprightly and die true
Heaven has no bars or locks,
And serves all taste.... Or what's for him to do
Up there, but hunt the fox?
Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide
For one who rode straight and at hunting died.

"So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came,
Why, it must find one now:
If any shirk and doubt they know the game,
There's one to teach them how:
And the whole host of Seraphim complete
Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet."

I have a notion that this is a gallant poem which Englishmen will not
allow to be forgotten. The great quality of Captain Graves' verse at
present is its elated vivacity, which neither fire, nor pain, nor grief
can long subdue. Acutely sensitive to all these depressing elements, his
animal spirits lift him like an aeroplane, and he is above us in a
moment, soaring through clouds of nonsense under a sky of unruffled
gaiety. In our old literature, of which he is plainly a student, he has
found a neglected author who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton,
Henry VIII's Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a great
deal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, _The Tunning of Elinore
Rummyng_ and _Colin Clout_. He likes rough metre, bad rhymes and squalid
images