The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Children are not meant to be studied, but enjoyed. Only by studying to be pleased do we understand them.

I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's