The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century by William Lyon Phelps
page 53 of 330 (16%)
page 53 of 330 (16%)
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We hold our hate too choice a thing
For light and careless lavishing. We cannot, dare not, make it cheap! For holy uses will we keep. A thing so pure, a thing so great As Heaven's benignant gift of hate. Is there no ancient, sceptred Wrong? No torturing Power, endured too long? Yea; and for these our hatred shall Be cloistered and kept virginal. He found occasion to draw from his cold storage of hate much sooner than he had anticipated. Being a convinced anti-imperialist, and having not a spark of antagonism to Germany, the early days of August, 1914, shocked no one in the world more than him. But after the first maze of bewilderment and horror, he drew his pen against the Kaiser in holy wrath. Most of his war poems have been collected in the little volume _The Man Who Saw,_ published in the summer of 1917. He has now at all events one satisfaction, that of being in absolute harmony with the national sentiment. In his Preface, after commenting on the pain he had suffered in times past at finding himself in opposition to the majority of his countrymen, he manfully says, "During the present war, with all its agonies and horrors, he has had at any rate the one private satisfaction of feeling not even the most momentary doubt or misgiving as to the perfect righteousness of his country's cause. There is nothing on earth of which he is more certain than that this Empire, throughout this supreme ordeal, has shaped her course by the light of purest duty." The volume opens with a fine tribute to Mr. |
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