I Don't Ask Myself, Is The Life

It Seemed That Out Of Battle I Escaped Down Some Profound Dull Tunnel, Long Since Scooped Through Granites Which Titanic Wars Had Groined.

If In Some Smothering Dreams You Too Could Pace Behind The Wagon That We Flung Him In, And Watch The White Eyes Writhing In His Face, His Hanging Face, Like A Devil's Sick Of Sin; If You Could Hear, At Every Jolt, The Blood Come Gargling From The Froth-corrupted Lungs, Obscene As Cancer, Bitter As The Cud Of Vile, Incurable Sores On Innocent Tongues,-- My Friend, You Would Not Tell With Such High Zest To Children Ardent For Some Desperate Glory, The Old Lie: Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.

And By His Smile, I Knew That Sullen Hall, By His Dead Smile I Knew We Stood In Hell.

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.

All Theological Lore Is Becoming Distasteful To Me.