Main Street, and Other Poems

<h2> The New School </h2> <h3> (For My Mother) </h3> <p>The halls that were loud with the merry tread of young and careless feet<br/> Are still with a stillness that is too drear to seem like holiday,<br/> And never a gust of laughter breaks the calm of the dreaming street<br/> Or rises to shake the ivied walls and frighten the doves away.<br/> <br/> The dust is on book and on empty desk, and the tennis-racquet and balls<br/> Lie still in their lonely locker and wait for a game that is never played,<br/> And over the study and lecture-room and the river and meadow falls<br/> A stern peace, a strange peace, a peace that War has made.<br/> <br/> For many a youthful shoulder now is gay with an epaulet,<br/> And the hand that was deft with a cricket-bat is defter with a sword,<br/> And some of the lads will laugh to-day where the trench is red and wet,<br/> And some will win on the bloody field the accolade of the Lord.<br/> <br/> They have taken their youth and mirth away<br/> from the study and playing-ground<br/> To a new school in an alien land beneath an alien sky;<br/> Out in the smoke and roar of the fight their lessons and games are found,<br/> And they who were learning how to live are learning how to die.<br/> <br/> And after the golden day has come and the war is at an end,<br/> A slab of bronze on the chapel wall will tell of the noble dead.<br/> And every name on that radiant list will be the name of a friend,<br/> A name that shall through the centuries in grateful prayers be said.<br/> <br/> And there will be ghosts in the old school,<br/> brave ghosts with laughing eyes,<br/> On the field with a ghostly cricket-bat, by the stream with a ghostly rod;<br/> They will touch the hearts of the living with a flame that sanctifies,<br/> A flame that they took with strong young hands<br/> from the altar-fires of God.<br/></p> <p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"></SPAN></p> <br/> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />