Anthem for Doomed Youth

Writers and Literature of The Great War, 1914-1918

Photo by Sherrill Schell, ca. 1917

A Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird upon the rain-wet lilac sings--
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)