The Forest of the Dead by James Griffyth Fairfax

There are strange trees in that pale field
Of barren soil and bitter yield:
They stand without the city walls;
Their nakedness is unconcealed.

Cross after cross, mound after mound,
And no flowers blossom but are bound
The dying and the dead, in the wreaths
Sad crowns for kings of Underground.

The forest of the dead is still
No song of birds can ever thrill
Among the sapless boughs that bear
No fruit, no flower, for good or ill.

The sun by day, the moon by night
Give terrible or tender light,
But day or night, the forest stands
Unchanging, desolately bright.

With loving or unloving eye
Kinsman and alien pass them by:
Do the dead know, do the dead care,
Under the forest as they lie?

To each the tree above his head.
To each the sign in which is said…..
‘by this thou art to overcome’:
Under this forest sleep no dead.

These, having life, gave life away:
Is God less generous than they?
The spirit passes and is free:
Dust too the dust; Death takes the clay.

From: https://allpoetry.com/The-Forest-of-the-Dead

Date: 1917

By: James Griffyth Fairfax (1886-1976)

Cannon Fodder by Alexander (Alec) Raban Waugh

Is it seven days you’ve been lying there
Out in the cold,
Feeling the damp, chill circlet of flesh
Loosen its hold
On muscles and sinews and bones,
Feeling them slip
One from the other to hang, limp on the stones?

Seven days. The lice must be busy in your hair,
And by now the worms will have had their share
Of eyelid and lip.
Poor, lonely thing; is death really a sleep?
Or can you somewhere feel the vermin creep
Across your face
As you lie, rotting, uncared for in the unowned place,
That you fought so hard to keep
Blow after weakening blow.

Well. You’ve got what you wanted, that spot is yours
No one can take it from you now.
But at home by the fire, their faces aglow
With talking of you,
They’ll be sitting, the folk that you loved,
And they will not know.

O Girl at the window combing your hair
Get back to your bed.
Your bright-limbed lover is lying out there
Dead.

O mother, sewing by candlelight,
Put away that stuff.
The clammy fingers of earth are about his neck.
He is warm enough.

Soon, like a snake in your honest home
The word will come.
And the light will suddenly go from it.
Day will be dumb.
And the heart in each aching breast
Will be cold and numb.

O men, who had known his manhood and truth,
I had found him true.
O you, who had loved his laughter and youth,
I had loved it too.
O girl, who has lost the meaning of life,
I am lost as you.

And yet there is one worse thing,
For all the pain at the heart and the eye blurred and dim,
This you are spared,
You have not seen what death has made of him.

You have not seen the proud limbs mangled and
Broken,
The face of the lover sightless raw and red,
You have not seen the flock of vermin swarming
Over the newly dead.

Slowly he’ll rot in the place where no man dare go,
Silently over the night the stench of his carcase will flow,
Proudly the worms will be banqueting…
This you can never know.

He will live in your dreams for ever as last you saw him.
Proud-eyed and clean, a man whom shame never knew,
Laughing, erect, with the strength of the wind in his manhood –
O broken-hearted mother, I envy you.

From: https://war-poetry.livejournal.com/23503.html

Date: 1917

By: Alexander (Alec) Raban Waugh (1898-1981)

Legendary Lights by Alter Abelson

O, the legendary light,
Gleaming goldenly in night
Like the stars above,
Beautiful, like lights in dream,
Eight, the taper-flames that stream
All one glory and one love.

In our Temple, magical—
Memories, now tragical—
Holy hero-hearts aflame
With a glory more than fame;
There where a shrine is every sod,
Every grave, God’s golden ore,
With a paean whose rhyme to God,
Lit these lamps of yore.

Lights, you are a living dream,
Faith and bravery you beam,
Youth and dawn and May.
Would your beam were more than dream,
Would the light and love you stream,
Stirred us, spurred us, aye!

Fabled memories of flame,
Till the beast in man we tame,
Tyrants bow to truth, amain,
Brands and bullets yield to brain,
Guns to God, and shells to soul,
Hounds to heart resign the role,
Pillared lights of liberty,
In your fairy flames, we’ll see
Faith’s and freedom’s Phoenix-might,
The Omnipotence of Right.

From: https://poets.org/poem/legendary-lights

Date: 1917

By: Alter Abelson (1880-1964)

Highland Night by Isabel Westcott Harper

1715—1815—1915

O turn ye homeward in the night-tide dusk!
⁠Return, O lad, across the watery dark.
⁠⁠The wind is eerie, and the sea growls low,
⁠And voices mutter in the caves. O hark!
⁠⁠The sea-bird hath her mate, but none I know.

All day the gulls are crying round the rocks,
⁠And spray is leaping white against their face;
⁠⁠The child is shouting, and the wind is sweet;
⁠Above our heads the flying cloudlets race,
⁠⁠Where we are on the hillside cutting peat.

The sun glints on the waves. I have no fear;
⁠My heart is filled with ancient battle songs;
But when the winter seas are crying loud,
⁠Phantoms of eld, and marching faery throngs,
⁠⁠From strange old tales into my fancy crowd.

They hold before my eyes a bloody plaid—
⁠A wail of warning hurries down the gust,
⁠⁠The door blows open, and the baby cries,
⁠And dark-red drops are trickling in the dust.
⁠⁠Kneeling I fall and cover up my eyes.

O turn ye homeward in the night-tide dusk!
⁠The door stands open, and the sea growls low.
⁠⁠Ah, lad, my candle shines across the night.
⁠The sea-bird hath her mate, but none I know;
⁠⁠Turn ye to me before the morning light.

From: Clarke, George Herbert (ed.), A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914-1919, 1917, Hodder and Stoughton: London and New York, pp. 56-57.
(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_treasury_of_war_poetry,_British_and_American_poems_of_the_world_war,_1914-1919/Scotland#Highland_Night)

Date: 1917

By: Isabel Westcott Harper (1896-1981)

Reveillé by Ronald Lewis Carton

In the place to which I go,
Better men than I have died.
Freeman friend and conscript foe,
Face to face and side by side,
In the shallow grave abide.

Melinite that seared their brains,
Gas that slew them in a snare,
War’s inferno of strange pains,
What are these to them who share
That great boon of silence there?

When like blood the moon is red;
And a shadow hides the sun,
We shall wake, the so-long dead,
We shall know our quarrel done,
Will God tell us who has won?

From: Carton, Ronald Lewis, Steel and Flowers, 1917, Elkin Mathews: London, p. 21.
(https://archive.org/details/steelflowers00cartiala/page/20/mode/2up)

Date: 1917

By: Ronald Lewis Carton (1888-19??)

Greeting to America Entering the War by Henry Bryan Binns

A boy, I dreamed that out of Liverpool
I sailed adventuring to the West. Romance
Presently led me thither, and th’ expanse
Of your wide world of freedom did not fool
My April dream. Anew, I went to school
To wonder, for I saw all circumstance
Growing obedient to man’s spirit, and chance
I saw you take, as it had been a tool.
But now, America, that we are set
Together down, commensal with the worm
At the feast of Slaughter, you have put a term
To all my faith’s shortcoming; you have met
Our will with yours, implacable to affirm
The whole of freedom that was never yet.

Henry Bryan Binns.
London
October the 28th 1917

From: Binns, Henry Bryan, November: Poems in War Time, 1918, Dodd, Mead and Company: New York, p. 118.
(https://archive.org/details/04556299.emory.edu/page/n117/mode/2up)

Date: 1917

By: Henry Bryan Binns (1873-1923)

Moira’s Keening by Norreys Jephson O’Conor

Story in verse of the death of an Irish soldier in Flanders:

O Mountains of Erin,
Your beauty is fled;
Beyond you in Flanders,
My darling lies dead.

Through the dunes and the grasses
Bespattered with blood,
They bore him; and round him,
Bareheaded they stood,

While the chaplain in khaki
Was reading a prayer,
And the wind for his keening
Was moaning an air.

O son of grey Connaught,
No more shall we stand
By the dark lough at evening,
My hand in your hand,

And talk of a houseen
To hold you and me,
The scent of the heather,
The gorse on the lea.

Yet bridegroom of mine,
You are waiting afar,
Past the peak and the blueness,
The shine of yon star,

Where Mary the Mother
Is bending her head,
And you sleep at her crooning,
O boy of mine! dead.

From: https://www.royal-irish.com/stories/moiras-keening

Date: 1917

By: Norreys Jephson O’Conor (1885-1958)

The Negro Soldiers by Roscoe Conkling Jamison

These truly are the Brave,
These men who cast aside
Old memories, to walk the blood-stained pave
Of Sacrifice, joining the solemn tide
That moves away, to suffer and to die
For Freedom—when their own is yet denied!
O Pride! O Prejudice! When they pass by,
Hail them, the Brave, for you now crucified!

These truly are the Free,
These souls that grandly rise
Above base dreams of vengeance for their wrongs,
Who march to war with visions in their eyes
Of Peace through Brotherhood, lifting glad songs,
Aforetime, while they front the firing line.
Stand and behold! They take the field today,
Shedding their blood like Him now held divine,
That those who mock might find a better way!

From: https://poets.org/poem/negro-soldiers/

Date: 1917

By: Roscoe Conkling Jamison (1888-1918)

Resurrection by Hermann Hagedorn

Not long did we lie on the torn, red field of pain.
We fell, we lay, we slumbered, we took rest,
With the wild nerves quiet at last, and the vexed brain
Cleared of the wingèd nightmares, and the breast
Freed of the heavy dreams of hearts afar.
We rose at last under the morning star.
We rose, and greeted our brothers, and welcomed our foes.
We rose; like the wheat when the wind is over, we rose.
With shouts we rose, with gasps and incredulous cries,
With bursts of singing, and silence, and awestruck eyes,
With broken laughter, half tears, we rose from the sod,
With welling tears and with glad lips, whispering, “God.”
Like babes, refreshed from sleep, like children, we rose,
Brimming with deep content, from our dreamless repose.
And, “What do you call it?” asked one. “I thought I was dead.”
“You are,” cried another. “We’re all of us dead and flat.”
“I’m alive as a cricket. There’s something wrong with your head.”
They stretched their limbs and argued it out where they sat.
And over the wide field friend and foe
Spoke of small things, remembering not old woe
Of war and hunger, hatred and fierce words.
They sat and listened to the brooks and birds,
And watched the starlight perish in pale flame,
Wondering what God would look like when He came.

From: https://www.bartleby.com/266/139.html

Date: 1917

By: Hermann Hagedorn (1882-1964)

Pierrot Goes to War by Gabrielle Elliot

In the sheltered garden pale beneath the moon,
(Drenched with swaying fragrance, redolent with June!)
There, among the shadows, some one lingers yet—
Pierrot, the lover, parts from Pierrette.

Bugles, bugles, bugles, blaring down the wind,
Sound the flaming challenge—Leave your dreams behind!
Come away from the shadows, turn your back on June—
Pierrot, go forward to face the golden noon.

In the muddy trenches, black and torn and still,
(How the charge swept over, to break against the hill!)
Huddled in  the shadows, boyish figures lie—
They whom Death, saluting, called upon to die.

Bugles, ghostly bugles, whispering down the wind—
Dreams too soon are over, gardens left behind.
Only shadows linger, for love does not forget—
Pierrot goes forward—but what of Pierrette?

From: https://allpoetry.com/Gabrielle-Elliot

Date: 1917

By: Gabrielle Elliot (fl. 1917)