Happy are men who yet before they are
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion
Or makes their
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers,
But they are troops who fade, not
For poets' tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for
Losses who might have
Longer; but no one bothers.
And some cease
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance's strange
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on Armies' decimation.
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror's first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.
Happy the soldier home, with not a
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless
From larger day to huger night.
We wise, who with a thought
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot
Old men's placidity from his.
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves
To pity and whatever mourns in
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
