From Leonard Bacon’s Day of Fire.

Easter Evening, 1942

Is this the time to speak? Shall we tell the strong
What they already know? Or tell the weak
What not to fear? Divide the right and wrong
With the musical tongue in the poetic cheek?

Shall we lift up some outcry, when our fate
Moves on us like a hurricane or flood?
With a few syllables make more delicate
The spectacle of violence and blood?

No! There is only this. And no Tyrtaean
Sentence is worth the expenditure of ink.
We need no marching song, nor any paean,
Only reality in what we think

And the mere valor of the common man,
That always will continue and persist,
That can endure all grief, and knows it can,
And, till it wins, will not unclench the fist.

It is beginning of wisdom when we withdraw
From the pleasant places where all things went well.
That’s over. We obey the ancient law
That makes strange Heaven in as strange a Hell.

Many are cowards. Many others lie.
The cowards must learn courage, the liar learn
Not to invent disasters in the sky,
Where, he has said, only cross planets burn.

‘Not for some victory,’ not for any race,
Or dull dominion of this world we fight
But for all strength of thought, kindness, and grace
That made ‘the feud with chaos and old Night.’