PRESAGE OF VICTORY

Then first I knew, seeing that bent grey head,

How England honours all her thousand dead.

Then first I knew how faith through black grief burns,

Until the ruined heart glows while it yearns

For one that never more returns —

Glows in the spent embers of its pride

For one that careless lived and fearless died.

And then I knew, then first,

How everywhere Hope from her prison had burst —

On every hill, wide dale, soft valley's lap,

In lonely cottage clutch'd between huge downs,

And streets confused with streets in clanging towns —

Like spring from winter's jail pouring her sap

Into the idle wood of last year's trees.

Then first I knew how the vast world-disease

Would die away, and England upon her seas

Shake every scab of sickness; toward new skies

Lifting a little holier her head,

With honesty the brighter in her eyes,

And all that urgent horror well forgot,

The dark remembered not;

Only remembered then, with bosom yet hot,

The blood that on how many a far field lies,

The bones enriching not our English earth

That brought them to such splendid birth

And the last sacrifice.