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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Cloyd Head

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Marne

Cloyd Head

From “War Sequence”

WITHIN that secret place—

Waste land where the rivers run red

Bearing the blood of the dead

To the charnel sea—

They build a temple and a mystery:

A freedom such as none may ever share

Who have not lived with Death,

Who have not killed.

Untempered passion, building as earth must build

Through uttermost destruction, reaching toward new life

Blindly, as if aware that out of death may rise

Fulfilment to whatever veiled will

Created conflict—a master-soul unknown.

Such freedom has no voice: it dares not own

The abyss, the horror, of a life made free;

The grandeur which it cannot understand.

Therefore the curtain and the mystery;

Therefore the silence that is No-man’s Land.