Siegfried Sassoon
War Poems
To His Dead Body
When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried,
Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died,
Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair
Can bring me no report of how you fare,
Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way
Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day,
Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind—
Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.

July 1916

Written in hospital at Amiens at the end of July 1916. It refers to Robert Graves, who had been reported Died of Wounds. A fortnight later Eddie Marsh wired to me at Oxford that R.G. was doing well and in hospital at Highgate.