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NOTES AND QUESTIONS

Biography. Alan Seeger (1888-1916) was an American poet who greatly admired French art and literature. In 1912 he went to Paris to study and write. He was visiting in London when the World War broke out, but returned to Paris immediately and joined the Foreign Legion to fight for France. This poem was written from the trenches during the winter, while Seeger was waiting for the renewal of active warfare in the spring. The poet took part in the battle of Champagne and was killed in action, July, 1916, in the attack on the village of Belloy-en-Santerre. During the war he formed a great friendship with an Egyptian, Rif Baer, who thus describes his last charge: "After the first bound forward, we lay flat on the ground. I caught sight of Seeger and made a sign to him with my hand. He answered with a smile. How pale he was! His tall silhouette stood out on the green of the cornfields. He was the tallest man in his section. His head was erect, and pride was in his eye. I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared, and that was the last time I saw my friend.”

Discussion. 1. Notice how the beautiful descriptions of nature, contrasted with the grim determination to keep the rendezvous, emphasize the joy of life and of living, and make the keeping of the pledge the more heroic; find lines that are sharply contrasted. 2. What effect is produced by making each stanza longer than the preceding one? 3. What other soldierpoets have you learned to know in this book? Do you know of any others? 4. Library reading: poems by the same author (in Poems). 5. Find in the Glossary the meaning of: barricade; quench; scarred; flaming. Pronounce: rendezvous.

ROUGE BOUQUET

JOYCE KILMER

In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet
There is a new-made grave today,
Built by never a spade nor pick,

Yet covered with earth ten meters thick.

5 There lie many fighting men,

Dead in their youthful prime;
Never to laugh nor love again

Nor taste the Summertime.

For Death came flying through the air

And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,
Touched his prey and left them there,
Clay to clay.

5 He hid their bodies stealthily

In the soil of the land they sought to free,
And fled away.

Now over the grave abrupt and clear

Three volleys ring;

10 And perhaps their brave young spirits hear

The bugle sing:

"Go to sleep!

Go to sleep!

Slumber well where the shell screamed and fell.

15 Let your rifles rest on the muddy floor;

You will not need them any more.

Danger's past;

Now at last,

Go to sleep!"

20 There is on earth no worthier grave To hold the bodies of the brave Than this place of pain and pride

25

Where they nobly fought and nobly died.
Never fear but in the skies

Saints and angels stand
Smiling with their holy eyes

On this new-come band.

St. Michael's sword darts through the air
And touches the aureole on his hair,
30 As he sees them stand saluting there,
His stalwart sons;

And Patrick, Brigid, Columkill

Rejoice that in veins of warriors still

The Gael's blood runs.

35 And up to Heaven's doorway floats,

From the wood called Rouge Bouquet,

A delicate cloud of bugle-notes

That softly say:

"Farewell!

Farewell!

5 Comrades true, born anew, peace to you!
Your souls shall be where the heroes are;

And your memory shine like the morning-star.

Brave and dear,

Shield us here.

10 Farewell!"

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

Biography. Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), born in New Brunswick, N. J., crowded much into the brief thirty-two years of his life. Before he was twenty-two he had been graduated from Rutgers College and Columbia University. He was literary critic for the New York Times and the Literary Digest. His life was a particularly happy one both in his chosen field of work and in his home with his wife and four children. Joyce Kilmer was soldier as well as poet, like David of old, of whom it is said, he "smote now his harp and now the hostile horde." When war was declared, he was among the first to enlist and insisted upon going as a private. "Naturally I'm expecting to go, being of appropriate age and sex," he wrote to a friend. After serving nearly a year, he died in the eager carrying out of a particularly dangerous piece of work. When the men of his own "Sixty-ninth" found him, his attitude was so like his keen, living self that they did not at first think him dead, for he lay as if scouting, seeking out the hidden battery which he was trying to locate. He lies buried on the trampled hillside where he fell, close to the river Ourcq. "Rouge Bouquet” was written in a dugout, and the poet called it "probably the best verse I have written."

Discussion. 1. Where did these fighting men meet death? 2. How does the refrain resemble "taps"? 3. What picture do these lines give you: "St. Michael's sword darts through the air and touches the aureole on his hair"? 4. Notice how painstakingly the poet worked out exactly the same rimingscheme in the two stanzas; what interesting fact do you note in the twentysecond line of each stanza? 5. What part of "taps" do these lines imitate? 6. Class reading: "Main Street," "Roofs," "The Snowman in the Yard," "Trees," "To a Blackbird and His Mate Who Died in the Spring," "Dave Lilly," Joyce Kilmer, in Poems, Essays, and Letters, Vol. I. The Bookman, October, 1918, has a portrait of Joyce Kilmer; try to get a copy to show your classmates. 7. Find in the Glossary the meaning of: aureole; Patrick; Brigid; Columkill; Gael. 8. Pronounce: Rouge Bouquet; stalwart.

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England's hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always 5 keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government; they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it once be understood that your government may be one thing, and their privileges another; that these two things may exist 10 without any mutual relation-the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith-wherever the chosen race and sons 15 of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces toward you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have;

the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia; but, until you become lost to all feelings of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the true Act of Navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally 10 made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions are the things that hold together 15 the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of English communion that gives all their life to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, in20 vigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member. Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England?

Do you imagine, then, that it is the land tax which raises your revenue? That it is the annual vote in the committee of 25 supply which gives you your army? Or that it is the mutiny bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and 30 infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

Biography. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the orator, was one of the outspoken friends of America in the English Parliament during the Revolutionary period. He was born in Dublin and studied law in London. In 1766 he entered Parliament and won immediate fame by his speech against

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