POETRY.

MAURUPT.

IN the seven. times. taken and retaken town Peace ! The mind stops : sense argues against sense.

The August sun is ghostly in the street As; if the silence of a thousand years Were its familiar. All is as it was At •the instant of the shattering : flat-thrown walls ;

Dislocated rafters ; lintels hurled awry.

And toppling over : what were windows, merely Gapings on mounds of shapelessness and dust ; Charred posts caught in a bramble of twisted iron ; Wires sagging ravelled across the street ; the blank Skeleton' of a vine wrenched from • the old house

It clung. to ; a limp bell-'pull; here. and -there

Little printed papers pasted on• the wall. It is like a madness crumpled up in stone,

Laughterless, tearless, enee.ningless; a frenzy.

Stilled, like at ebb the shingle of sea-caves Where that imagined weight of water swung Its senseless crash with pebbles in myriads churned By the random seethe. But here was flesh and blood! Seeing eyes, feeling nerves; mernoried minds With the habit of the picture of these fields And the white roads crossing the ,broad green plain.

All vanished 1 One could fancy the very fields.

Were memory's projection, phantoms. All Silentl The stone is hot to the touching hand.

Footsteps come strange, to the sense. In the: sloped

churchyard, Where the tower shows the blue through its great rents, Shadows fall over pitiful wrecked graves, And on the gravel a bareheaded boy, Hands in his pockets, with brown absent eyes,

Whistles the Mareeillaise. " To arms, To arms 1"

There is no other sound in the bright air. It is as if they heard under the grass,

Tho dead men of the Marne, and their thin voice

Used these young lips to sing it from their graves, The song that sang a nation into arms.

And far away on the listening ear in the silence Like remote thunder throb the guns of France.

LAURENCE BIN'YON,