# Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/Ode in a German Cemetery

ODE IN A GERMAN CEMETERY Where Many Victims of the Great War Were Interred.
Rancour grows chastened in these groves of death, And clamorous recrimination hushed, Our pain disarmed by pain, We can but leave upon these graves the wreath Our mortal foes by mortal visitation crushed Have woven for their slain.
Still to this day, Driven by their bitterness, they come to pray And kneeling in the wind-blown grass Grope vainly for relief, And as I pass Rise in distressed confusion and sore grief.
What did these know of empire's sordid ends, Markets and routes and ancient rivalries? Balance of power and dark expediencies, Reasons of state, The vain hallucinations of the great?
Why should these make amends For others' wrongs? What guilt for all this ruin here belongs? Or if some taint of envy or of hate Were theirs, yet even so, Which is the greater misery, sin or woe?
Muse on these mute inscriptions, each of which Stands for a life past divination rich In poignant exploitations And eager explorations Of its allotted freehold in the Day; Rich in those naïve essays of the heart, Forlorn, confiding gestures That of this dark enigma make assay, And tendril-like adventures ​Whereby we grope and sound and prove Whether some circumambient Love Greet and reward our motion to aspire. Muse on each acted part; Forgotten exultations, rage, and smart, Their faith's extinguished fire, And little triumphs that none think upon, And protests smothered in oblivion.
Muse on this epitaph that meets the eye, Strangely familiar in its alien tongue, "These for our homes did die,"— Two brothers loved of nameless folk, who won This as earth's final comment at Verdun, In that stentorian month whose havoc flung Its hundred thousands down to Acheron; In that inordinate reaping Of these our fields beneath When twilight was congested with the hosts Of death's dim, swarming envoys bent upon Prodigious inroads down life's fertile coasts, Its virgin prairies sweeping In far incursions where no scythe had shone; Till earth was cumbered with the oppressive weight Of such a garnering underneath the sun, Such high-heaped sheaves of death; Till one by one, Borne off across the stars in phantom state, Death's groaning wains conveyed The great ingathering to the realms of shade, And throngs unwonted choked the Stygian gate.
...Races of men, co-heirs of earth's duress, Children of night, and orphans of the void, Ringed 'round with menace and with mystery, Condemned at birth to death in loneliness, Proscribed and hunted, trampled and destroyed By the blind furies of the earth and sea— ​Why still increase the overwhelming odds Against us—add this self-inflicted curse— That we should hunt each other in the path Of cataclysm, stay to vent our wrath One on the other in the middle-way Of swift annihilation, tear and slay Beneath the onslaught of the universe, Wage civil war, our seats stormed by the gods? E'en the wild beasts forego their lust for blood, Fleeing in panic through a blazing wood....
Mysterious is the lot of common lives Lost in the mass, Anonymous as leaves or blades of grass In the thick verdure of humanity, And inexistent to the powers that be: Such were these all; And so like leaves they fall, Or one by one, Or, when some storm of retribution drives Over the face of mankind at the call Of surcharged passions, Unnumbered from their humble holdings wrenched, Before the blast they run, Creatures of life's blind impulse and its altering fashions, To the deep drifts of still oblivion; Save where their thought survives In that sequestered spot where they were known, In some frail fort of love 'gainst death and time entrenched.
Even their vices were not all their own, Inevitably sown In childhood's hospitable tilth By the thick-flying seed Of man's continuing legacy of ill, His cherished heirlooms of disease and filth, And rank depravities of ancient date, And unimpaired inheritance of hate, ​That generation unto generation still Contrives to will. Errors, obscenities and passions breed, With germs of violence rife, As in a culture fitted to that end In human life, Nor need man to their breeding his impulsion lend.
Then, fallen foe, and friend, Sleep, Sleep in repose, And you, you suffering mother, cease to weep. What though we late were foes? We fought in nightmare, as in dreams we live; Best to forgive.
Aspiring howsoever, you, or I, The great world weaves its tentacles of ill Into our hearts, the solidarity Of mortal evil claims us 'gainst our will, And with it sinning, with it we must die.
Yet those who in the world-old process caught Bring thither self-renunciation, aught Of loftier aim, of loftier ideal, Of loftier thought, And bear the common curse, the shared ordeal, The common retribution, undeserved, These in all lands, all times, all causes, these That law by innocence appease; By their sublime attractiveness they win The world from its fatality of sin, And from the common lot Desiring no exemption, Their blamelessness with mighty power is fraught When joined with pain, For so Redemption, Redemption lifts its mighty cross again!
​So swerved By love's vast leverage from its ancient grooves And changeless cycles of eternal wars, The planet moves To grander revolutions among softer stars And skies unblasted by the beams of Mars, To placid periods under milder rays, Pacific seasons, august nights and days.
Munich, July 1921.