C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
O. M.
Poems of the Great War: Master and Pupil
T
And used to give him hints on bowling:
His classics were a trifle weak;
His “action” needed some controlling.
Convinced of my superior nous
I thought him crude, and I was rather
Inclined, as master of his House,
To treat him like a heavy father.
Upon his “lack of concentration”;
Though certainly at winter Sports
He did not earn this condemnation.
I took him out San Moritz way
One Christmas, and our rôles inverted,
For in the land of ski and sleigh
His mastery was soon asserted.
Well-mannered, wholesome, unaffected;
The makings of a Galahad
In him I had not yet detected;
And when I strove to mend his style,
Blue-penciling his exercises,
I little guessed that all the while
His soul was ripe for high emprises.
Rejected as unfit; still trying
(As Verrall taught me on the Cam)
To make Greek Plays electrifying.
And he who, till he was eighteen,
Found life one long excuse for laughing,
For eighteen solid months has been
Continuously “strafed” or “strafing.”
Which prove, although he doesn’t know it,
That though his words are plain and blunt,
He has the vision of a poet;
And lately, on his eight days’ rest,
After long months of hard campaigning,
He came, and lo! an angel guest
I was aware of entertaining.
But often of his widowed mother,
And how she nobly bore the stroke
That robbed them of his sailor brother.
And still, from loyalty or whim,
He would defer to my opinion,
Unconscious how I envied him
His hard-earned gift of self-dominion.
Of Shadows in the darksome Valley,
And scorned the terrors of his sting
In many a perilous storm and sally.
Firm in the faith that never tires
Or thinks that man is God-forsaken,
From war’s fierce seven-times-heated fires
He had emerged unseared, unshaken.
To serve their country in her trial,
Embattled in the cause divine
Of sacrifice and self-denial;
But if there were, I could not pray
That God might shield them from disaster
More strongly than I plead to-day
For this my pupil and my master.