Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet's

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they

Your cosmopolitan sympathies,

Now you have touched this English

You will do the same to a

Soon, no doubt, if it be your

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our

At the shrieking iron and

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver -what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in men's

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe,

Just a little white with the dust.

This was written in a letter to Eddie Marsh in 1916, shortly after he had arrived at "The Front".

In the letter he describes it as "a poem I wrote in the trenches, which is surely as simple as ordinary talk"