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MONT DE CASSEL, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Here on the sunnier scarp of the hill let us rest
Last Line: The thunder-throated cannonade booms on.
Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund
Subject(s): World War I; First World War


HERE on the sunnier scarp of the hill let us rest,
And hoard the hastening hour,
Find a mercy unexpressed
In the chance wild flower
We may find on the pathway side, or the glintering flint,
Or other things so small and unregarded:
Descry far windows fired with the sun, to whom
Nothing is small or mean.
To us, let the war be a leering ghost now shriven,
And as though it had never been;
A tragedy mask discarded.
A lamp in a tomb.
What though in the hounded east, now we are gone,
The thunder-throated cannonade boom on?
Too long we have striven,
Too soon we return.
The white stone roads go valleyward from the height,
Like our hopes, to be lost in haze
Where the bonfires burn
With the dross of summer days --
(Our summer hideous, harvesting affright).
Ah, see the silver Spirit dream among his quiet dells,
Hear the slow slumbrous bells,
The voices of a world long by,
Come dim and clear and dim
As the wheat-leys sleep or sigh.
Fall into musings thence, let Psyche stray
Where she lists,
Among small things of little account,
Or through the coloured mists; --
Myriad the roads to the visionary mount,
And the white forehead of the Mystery.
But alas, she falls in a swoon,
Pale-lipped like a withering moon;
So terrible is the insistency
Of the east where like a fiend automaton
The thunder-throated cannonade booms on.





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