"To these I turn, in these I trust; Brother Lead and Sister Steel. To his blind power I make appeal; I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spins and burns and loves the air, And splits a skull to win my praise; But up the nobly marching days She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this; That in good fury he may feel The body where he sets his heel Quail from your downward darting kiss."
-Siegfried Sassoon, "The Kiss"
Here was a man endowed with a tremulous sensitivity to all the nuances of beauty ("yellow lilies islanded in light," etc., etc.), who, finding himself in the midst of unthinkable carnage and suffering and hypocrisy and horror, had the goodness to put his keen perceptive abilities and his flinty intelligence to work documenting it, so that those in power could be brought to see and feel and remember and, moreover, to act accordingly. His courage, both moral and physical, and his moral clarity, which finds a mirror in the utterly modern clarity of his poetic line, make him a continuing inspiration in our times.
Here was a man endowed with a tremulous sensitivity to all the nuances of beauty ("yellow lilies islanded in light," etc., etc.), who, finding himself in the midst of unthinkable carnage and suffering and hypocrisy and horror, had the goodness to put his keen perceptive abilities and his flinty intelligence to work documenting it, so that those in power could be brought to see and feel and remember and, moreover, to act accordingly. His courage, both moral and physical, and his moral clarity, which finds a mirror in the utterly modern clarity of his poetic line, make him a continuing inspiration in our times.