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Robert Laurence Binyon - Oxford In War—Time
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What alters you, familiar lawn and tower,
 Arched alley, and garden green to the gray wall
 With crumbling crevice and the old wine--red flower,
 Solitary in summer sun? for all

 Is like a dream: I tread on dreams! No stir
 Of footsteps, voices, laughter! Even the chime
 Of many--memoried bells is lonelier
 In this neglected ghostliness of Time.

 What stealing touch of separation numb
 Absents you? Yet my heart springs up to adore
 The shrining of your soul, that is become
 Nearer and oh, far dearer than before.

 It is as if I looked on the still face
 Of a Mother, musing where she sits alone.
 She is with her sons, she is not in this place;
 She is gone out into far lands unknown.

 Because that filled horizon occupies
 Her heart with mute prayer and divining fear,
 Therefore her hands so calm lie, and her eyes
 See nothing; and men wonder at her here:

 But far in France; on the torn Flanders plain;
 By Sinai; in the Macedonian snows;
 The fly--plagued sands of Tigris, heat and rain;
 On wandering water, where the black squall blows

 Less danger than the bright wave ambushes,
 She bears it out. All the long day she bears
 And the sudden hour of instant challenges
 To act, that searches all men, no man spares.

 She is with her sons, leaving a virtue gone
 Out of her sacred places: what she bred
 Lives other life than this, that sits alone,
 Though still in dream starrily visited!

 For O in youth she lives, not in her age!
 Her soul is with the springtime and the young;
 And she absents her from the learned page,
 Studious of high histories yet unsung,

 More passionately prized than wisdom`s book
 Because her own. Her faith is in those eyes
 That clear into the gape of hell can look,
 Putting to proof ancient philosophies

 Such as the virgin Muses would rehearse
 Beside the silvery, swallow--haunted stream,
 Under the gray towers. But immortal verse
 Is now exchanged for its immortal theme--

 Victory; proud loss; and the enduring mind;
 Youth, that has passed all praises, and has won
 More than renown, being that which faith divined,
 Reality more radiant than the sun.

 She gave, she gives, more than all anchored days
 Of dedicated lore, of storied art;
 And she resigns her beauty to men`s gaze
 To mask the riches of her bleeding heart.
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