Chapter XIV: Snowfall on a Battle-Field

Compassion of heaven,
From night's crystal bars,
Falling so gently
In wreaths of white stars;

Petals of mystery
Culled in far lands;
Crosses of Calvary,
Wrought by strange hands;

Gems from His mountains,
Facets so rare,
Foam from His fountain
Eternally fair.

Why do they lovingly
Leave their fair home,
These leaves of God's gardens,
To stray on earth's loam?

See how they hover
Over faces so cold,
How reverently cover
The young and the old!

Compassion of heaven,
Tears from God's eyes,
Falling so gently
Out of the skies.

The Great Mother

Where meet the streams from the earth's many fountains,
That part from each other with myriad aims--
The Danube that springs from its far-distant mountains,
The Tiber, the Seine, the Rhine and the Thames;
Far from each other, independent and free,
Yet do not all of them flow to the sea?

Loud do their cataracts fling out their thunder
Through the deep gorges that lead them along.
Hundreds of leagues divide them asunder;
Yet, see how resistless their dark waters throng.
In whirlpool and rapid, with agonized motion,
Until they find rest in the world's level ocean.

And from the world's frontiers came the world's races,
Diverse as their colors and languages run;
Life bade them stand with alien faces,
With wrongs to requite, till Death made them one
With the silence that broods on his passionless land,
By the call of his voice and the seal of his hand.

Repose now their ashes in earth's tender keeping--
Dust unto dust, as the autumn leaves fall;
Peace, peace at last to tired eyes sleeping,
To Saxon, and Teuton, to Latin and Gaul;
Back to the great Mother--thus it must be,
As their home-rivers flow to the sea.

In Memoriam

I

The Dead! Upon a purple-bordered scroll
We wrote their names; then gazed awhile, and said:
"These are the fallen; these, our honored dead,
The silent ones in Death's vast muster roll.
This one was strong and ruddy; that one frail,
Though fleet of foot and keen. The first one met
His fate in that fierce fight at Courcelette;
The other died of wounds at Passchendaele."

And thus we mused, pointing from name to name
With sad, slow count. We spoke of things like grass,
And withered leaves, and faded flowers, birth,
Old age, decay and dust, glory and fame,
And other strange mortalities that pass
At length into the all-insatiate earth.