Someone said: “Nevermore will they come: evermore

      Are they now lost to us.”  O it was wrong!

      Though may be hard their ways, some Hand will guard their ways,

      Bear them through safely, in brief time or long.

      – Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,

      Hint in the night-time when life beats are low

      Other and graver things.. Hold we to braver things,

      Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fulness shall show.

      Last year I called this world of gain-givings

      The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly

      If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,

      So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs

         The tragedy of things.

      Yet at that censured time no heart was rent

      Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter

      By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter;

      Death waited Nature’s wont; Peace smiled unshent

         From Ind to Occident.

      South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

      A mouldering soldier lies – your countryman.

      Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,

      And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans

      Nightly to clear Canopus: “I would know

      By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

      Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

      Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

      And what of logic or of truth appears

      In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?

      Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,

      But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.”

      They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

         Uncoffined – just as found:

      His landmark is a kopje-crest

         That breaks the veldt around;

      And foreign constellations west

         Each night above his mound.

      Young Hodge the Drummer never knew —

         Fresh from his Wessex home —

      The meaning of the broad Karoo,

         The Bush, the dusty loam,

      And why uprose to nightly view

         Strange stars amid the gloam.

      Yet portion of that unknown plain

         Will Hodge for ever be;

      His homely Northern breast and brain

         Grow up a Southern tree.

      And strange-eyed constellations reign

         His stars eternally.

      She sits in the tawny vapour

            That the City lanes have uprolled,

            Behind whose webby fold on fold

      Like a waning taper

         The street-lamp glimmers cold.

      A messenger’s knock cracks smartly,

            Flashed news is in her hand

            Of meaning it dazes to understand

      Though shaped so shortly:

         He – has fallen – in the far South Land.

      ’Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,

            The postman nears and goes:

            A letter is brought whose lines disclose

      By the firelight flicker

         His hand, whom the worm now knows:

      Fresh – firm – penned in highest feather —

            Page-full of his hoped return,

            And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn

      In the summer weather,

         And of new love that they would learn.

         The thick lids of Night closed upon me

            Alone at the Bill

            Of the Isle by the Race 1—

         Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face —

      And with darkness and silence the spirit was on me

            To brood and be still.

         No wind fanned the flats of the ocean,

            Or promontory sides,

            Or the ooze by the strand,

         Or the bent-bearded slope of the land,

      Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion

            Of criss-crossing tides.

         Soon from out of the Southward seemed nearing

            A whirr, as of wings

            Waved by mighty-vanned flies,

         Or by night-moths of measureless size,

      And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond hearing

            Of corporal things.

         And they bore to the bluff, and alighted —

            A dim-discerned train

            Of sprites without mould,

         Frameless souls none might touch or might hold —

      On the ledge by the turreted lantern, farsighted

            By men of the main.

         And I heard them say “Home!” and I knew them

            For souls of the felled

            On the earth’s nether bord

         Under Capricorn, whither they’d warred,

      And I neared in my awe, and gave heedfulness to them