Endless lanes sunken in the clay, <br />Bays, and traverses, fringed with wasted herbage, <br />Seed-pods of blue scabious, and some lingering blooms; <br />And the sky, seen as from a well, <br />Brilliant with frosty stars. <br />We stumble, cursing, on the slippery duck-boards. <br />Goaded like the damned by some invisible wrath, <br />A will stronger than weariness, stronger than animal fear, <br />Implacable and monotonous. <br /> <br />Here a shaft, slanting, and below <br />A dusty and flickering light from one feeble candle <br />And prone figures sleeping uneasily, <br />Murmuring, <br />And men who cannot sleep, <br />With faces impassive as masks, <br />Bright, feverish eyes, and drawn lips, <br />Sad, pitiless, terrible faces, <br />Each an incarnate curse. <br /> <br />Here in a bay, a helmeted sentry <br />Silent and motionless, watching while two sleep, <br />And he sees before him <br />With indifferent eyes the blasted and torn land <br />Peopled with stiff prone forms, stupidly rigid, <br />As tho’ they had not been men. <br /> <br />Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang, <br />The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life, <br />Eyes that have laughed to eyes, <br />And these were begotten, <br />O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt <br />With the lust of a man’s first strength: ere they were rent, <br />Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn <br />In bloody fragments, to be the carrion <br />Of rats and crows. <br /> <br />And the sentry moves not, searching <br />Night for menace with weary eyes.<br /><br />Frederic Manning<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-trenches/
