A huge vista of life and suffering humankind
Siegfried Sassoon
which makes the present troubles easier to endure,
and the loneliness of death a little thing.
Clouds came down and blotted the landscape
and we squatted in a vineyard and smoked
our pipes by the blaze of dry olive-branches.
In the cloudy weather after rain
the clearness of the hills and glens
shifted from shadow to gleams of watery light
and the skylines were clean-cut
and delicate-edged. The hills looked green—
there was a look of Ireland about it.
And when we got home to camp
I found a letter from Dorothea,
the good soul, full of Limerick hunting,
and hounds flying over the big green banks.
Our padré rather drunk to-night
after all the communion wine he’d blessed
and been obliged to ‘finish up’.
And the news from remote France
grows more ominous every day.
(From Siegfried Sassoon’s diary, 1918)
Verbatim Poetry 