I. M. Parsons (1906–1980)

Men Who March Away : Poems of the First World War
An Anthology, Edited with an Introduction by I. M. Parsons

“The roster of poets included in Men Who March Away:
Richard Aldington, Herbert Asquith, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, John Freeman, Wilfrid Wilson Gibbon, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivon Gurney, Thomas Hardy, F. W. Harvey, A. P. Herbert, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Charlotte Mew, Carold Monro, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Fredegond Shove, Frank Sidgwick, Osbert Sitwell, Charles Sorley, Edward Thomas, Arthur Graeme West, T. P. Cameron Wilson, W. B. Yeats”

Notes:

The book title comes from ‘Men Who March Away’ (Song of the Soldiers; September 5, 1914), by Thomas Hardy. Here is one stanza:

What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
Leaving all that here can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away?

And one from ’Mesoptamia’ (1917), by Rudyard Kipling.
They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

This poem, in its entirety: ’A Lament’ by - Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

Notes? I have not a single word to add.… (more)