and with what body do they come?" "How shall I bear my light across?"
and of the defiant cry: "If Christ be not raised, then is our faith vain."

The theme has three phases: the first a calm, a deadly calm,
opening statement in five lines; the second in four lines,
an explanation, a regret, a reiteration of the first; the third,
without preliminary crescendo, breaking out into passionate adjuration
in vivid metaphor, a poignant appeal which is at once a blessing and a curse.
In the closing line is a satisfying return to the first phase, --
and the thing is done. One is so often reminded of the poverty
of men's invention, their best being so incomplete, their greatest
so trivial, that one welcomes what -- this Sapper officer surmised --
may become a new and fixed mode of expression in verse.

As to the theme itself -- I am using his words: what is his is mine;
what is mine is his -- the interest is universal. The dead, still conscious,
fallen in a noble cause, see their graves overblown in a riot of poppy bloom.
The poppy is the emblem of sleep. The dead desire to sleep undisturbed,
but yet curiously take an interest in passing events. They regret
that they have not been permitted to live out their life to its normal end.
They call on the living to finish their task, else they shall not sink
into that complete repose which they desire, in spite of the balm
of the poppy. Formalists may protest that the poet is not sincere,
since it is the seed and not the flower that produces sleep.
They might as well object that the poet has no right to impersonate the dead.
We common folk know better. We know that in personating the dear dead,
and calling in bell-like tones on the inarticulate living,
the poet shall be enabled to break the lightnings of the Beast,
and thereby he, being himself, alas! dead, yet speaketh; and shall speak,
to ones and twos and a host. As it is written in resonant bronze: