Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,

 Shook all our coffins as we lay,

 And broke the chancel window-squares,

 We thought it was the Judgment-day

 And sat upright.  While drearisome

 Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

 The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

 The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled.  Till God called, "No;

 It's gunnery practice out at sea

 Just as before you went below;

 The world is as it used to be:

 "All nations striving strong to make

 Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

 They do no more for Christés sake

 Than you who are helpless in such matters.

 "That this is not the judgment-hour

 For some of them's a blessed thing,

 For if it were they'd have to scour

 Hell's floor for so much threatening….

 "Ha, ha.  It will be warmer when

 I blow the trumpet (if indeed

 I ever do; for you are men,

 And rest eternal sorely need)."

 So down we lay again.  "I wonder,

 Will the world ever saner be,"

 Said one, "than when He sent us under

 In our indifferent century!"

 And many a skeleton shook his head.

 "Instead of preaching forty year,"

 My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

 "I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

 Again the guns disturbed the hour,

 Roaring their readiness to avenge,

 As far inland as Stourton Tower,

 And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Composition Date:

April 1914.The lyrical form of this poem is abab.

3. chancel: front area in a church holding the altar and the choir.

9. glebe cow: cow put out to pasture on church land for the

vicar.

35. Stourton Tower: in Wiltshire, a tower built to honour

Alfred the Great's victory over the Danes.

36.Camelot: King Arthur's court, associated with Winchester

or Tintagel in Cornwall.

Stonehenge: prehistoric megalithic circle

on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.