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The Spike or Victoria College Review 1941

For us no More in Epic Encounter

page 48

For us no More in Epic Encounter

For us no more in epic encounter
The physical joy of the Iliad
The faith of the Paradiso
(Steel structure of Thomas Aquinas)
Now no more Aegean and Mediterranean,
Blind Maeonides and the exiled Florentine
Moving assured in worlds they could understand;
Rather for us the Virgilian indecision
The lacrimae rerum and the question unanswered.

But you would have understood us;
You knew our loneliness, the wild around us,
The dragon in the dark and the fiend in the fenland,
Death in all its shapes and desolation
In bog and moor and the inimical sea,
Wierd waiting without; and the heart yet unappalled.

Our bleak promontory the mists encircle;
We who are heroes
Not by choice but mere chronology
Lug the machine gun to the dismal beach
And await the onset of a heroic age.

Ian A. Gordon.