Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.

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

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled.

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.