Roland Leighton > Quotes

“Villanelle - Roland Leighton

Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head;
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood-
Think what they have meant to me-
Life and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing you will understand.”
― Roland Leighton

“Nachkland - Roland Leighton

Down the long white road we walked together
Down between the grey hills and the heather,
Where the tawny-crested
Plover cries.

You seemed all brown and soft, just like a linnet,
Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it,
And there shone all April
In your eyes.

With your golden voice of tears and laughter
Softened into song 'Does aught come after
Life,' you asked 'When life is
Laboured through?

What is God and all for which we're striving?'
'Sweetest sceptic, we were born for living;
Life is Love, and Love is---
You, dear, you.”
― Roland Leighton

“What is God, and all for which we’re striving?
Sweetest skeptic, we were born for living.
Life is Love, and Love is –
You, dear, you.”
― Roland Leighton

“Hedauville

The sunshine on the long white road
That ribboned down the hill,
The velvet clematis that clung
Around your window sill,
Are waiting for you still.


Again the shadowed pool shall break,
In dimples round your feet,
And when the thrush sings in your wood,
Unknowing you may meet
Another stranger, sweet.

And if he is not quite as old
As the boy you used to know,
And less proud too, and worthier,
You may not let him go.
(And daisies are truer than passion flowers)
It will be better so.”
― Roland Leighton

“Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love ofCountry with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of putrescence! Who is there that has known and seen, who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?”
― Roland Leighton