And you, my semblables, are doubly killed

To be buried in desert and deserted earth.

The flags are natures newly found.

Rifles grow sharper on the sight.

There is a rumble of autumnal marching,

From which no soft sleeve relieves us.

Fate is the present desperado.

And you, my semblables, are crusts that lie

In the shrivellings of your time and place.

There is a battering of the drums. The bugles

Cry loudly, cry out in the powerful heart.

A force gathers that will cry loudlier

Than the most metal music, loudlier,

Like an instinctive incantation.

And you, my semblables, in the total

Of remembrance share nothing of ourselves.

An end must come in a merciless triumph,

An end of evil in a profounder logic,

In a peace that is more than a refuge,

In the will of what is common to all men,

Spelled from spent living and spent dying.

And you, my semblables, in gaffer-green,

Know that the past is not part of the present.

There were other soldiers, other people,

Men came as the sun comes, early children

And late wanderers creeping under the barb of night,

Year, year and year, defeated at last and lost

In an ignorance of sleep with nothing won.

And you, my semblables, know that this time

Is not an early time that has grown late.

But these are not those rusted armies.

There are the lewdest and the lustiest,

The hullaballoo of health and have,

The much too many disinherited

In a storm of torn-up testaments.

And you, my semblables, know that your children

Are not your children, not your selves.

Who are the mossy cronies muttering,

Monsters antique and haggard with past thought?

What is this crackling of voices in the mind,

This pitter-patter of archaic freedom,

Of the thousands of freedoms except our own?

And you, my semblables, whose ecstasy

Was the glory of heaven in the wilderness—

Freedom is like a man who kills himself

Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife

Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves,

And in their blood an ancient evil dies—

The action of incorrigible tragedy.

And you, my semblables, behold in blindness

That a new glory of new men assembles.

This is the pit of torment that placid end

Should be illusion, that the mobs of birth

Avoid our stale perfections, seeking out

Their own, waiting until we go

To picnic in the ruins that we leave.

So that the stars, my semblables, chimeres,

Shine on the very living of those alive.

These violent marchers of the present,

Rumbling along the autumnal horizon,

Under the arches, over the arches, in arcs

Of a chaos composed in more than order,

March toward a generation’s centre.

Time was not wasted in your subtle temples.

No: nor divergence made too steep to follow down.

The Motive for Metaphor

You like it under the trees in autumn,

Because everything is half dead.

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.