De Engelse dichter Siegfried Sassoon werd geboren op 8 september 1886 in Brenchley, Kent. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Siegfried Sassoon op dit blog.

At Daybreak

I listen for him through the rain,

And in the dusk of starless hours

I know that he will come again;

Loth was he ever to forsake me:

He comes with glimmering of flowers

And stir of music to awake me.

Spirit of purity, he stands

As once he lived in charm and grace:

I may not hold him with my hands,

Nor bid him stay to heal my sorrow;

Only his fair, unshadowed face

Abides with me until to-morrow.

Butterflies

Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;

O living flowers against the heedless blue

Of summer days, what sends them dancing through

This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?

Theirs are the musing silences between

The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make

Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;

And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its way

Out of the starlit dimness into morn:

And they are as my tremulous being—born

To know but this, the phantom glare of day.

Attack

AT dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun,

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Siegfried Sassoon (8 september 1886 – 1 september 1967)
Portret door Glyn Warren Philpot, 1917

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