Classic Poem

On the tower of Little Saling
The leads are warm with sun,
And there along the tree-tops
You hear the breezes run,
While twenty miles of Essex wheat
Spread out to comfort one.

On the leads of Little Saling
I lay and took my rest,
And when I lost the cornlands
I watched the sky go west
Till the windy flow of Heaven
Was flame within my breast.

Down in the world below me
I heard the morning pass;
The blackbird's leisured fluting;
The elm-tree's whispering mass,
And the steely clash and rattle
Of mowing in the grass.

Yet below the blackbird's music
And the whir of the machine
And the blowing leagues of summer
That billowed in between,
I caught a sound like thunder
Behind a windy screen.

Up from the leads I started
And sought the church below.
“Out there,” I said, “in Flanders,
There's more than grass to mow!”
But as I passed the pillars
I paused that I might know

What glimmer down the chancel
In golden words might be,
And there I read the legend
That “Peace” was unto me.
Yet, as I read, I seemed to hear
Faint gunfire out to sea.
…

It was “Liveliness in Flanders”
The morning papers said,
Which meant writhing heaps of horror
While the screaming shells o'erhead
Made corpse-stuff in the trenches
Of Things already dead.

Oh, men may do the mowing,
And men may reap the corn,
But there are women weeping
For the boys that they have borne
Who lie broken into manhood
Beneath the summer dawn.

And if Love rules in Heaven,
And if the words are true
In Little Saling chancel
Of “Peace be unto you,”
How comes it that, out seaward,
The great guns roar anew?

While old men goad the slaughter
Who are safe with hoary heads,
There are Essex boys in Flanders
Who are cold in bloody beds
Though the sun at Little Saling
Lies warm upon the leads.