VERSES

Evening Star, Issue 23723, 2 November 1940, Page 4

VERSES

RAIN Whensoever silver clouds are turned to silver water . Down there in the gardens there’s a coming and a going, Someone reads the rainfall where the sweet, wet flowers are blowing, Thinks not on the Gloire de Dijon or the hand that wrought her, Thinks not on the lush laburnum and her sweeping treasure, Thinks of nothing but the rainfall that his gauge will measure. Like Evangelist he presses with his scribbled tally To tho town’s heart that the news may run from hill to valley. Is there in the wonder-world a norm for our divining, Sound of rain upon the glebe, of rain in thirsty summer, _ . Rain upon the housetops as it were an elfin drummer Bourdoning the reeds of Pan among the sedges whining. Who shall count the calls of birds that follow on the shower. Measure not but meditate, for every frond and flower In tho boundless chancellry upholds its separate station. Everv blackbird in the land lifts up its own oblation. Wheresoever I may lie apart from rain and thunder, Tireless shall the watcher come, undaunted of the weather. Bird may flute in solitude or birds may shout together, Or a single daffodil may bend in silent wonder. Hour of glory in the grass. A single poet has named it. Mercy like the gentle shower, a million souls have claimed it. Once an exile heard the rain within a cloistered dwelling, And his keyboard told the tale beyond all human telling. —C. R. Allen. PEACE One morning we shall wake to find This nightmare old and out to grass In the last meadow of the mind, For all things pass; Wake, as a child that starts wild-eyed From fear’s invasion of the brain, Draw peace, a soft toy, to the side, And sleep again. —Patric Dickinson, in the ‘ Observer.’ NATIONAL ANTHEMS National anthems move us largely because they are expressions of the indestructible souls of nations (writes Robert Lynd, in ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly’). “Finis” was written to the tale of Poland as a free nation more than 100 years ago. In our own time, Poland rose into freedom and has sunk once more into servitude; but even in servitude she sings her eong of freedom and knows that the end is not yet. Every national anthem of a conquered people that we hear is a prophetic hymn of liberation. If they are defiant, it is with defiance of the oppressor, with defiance of evil. Listen _to them im- 1 aginatively and you will discover in them hope for the future of the peoples of the world. I know a man—a man who is in most respects exceptionally intelligent—who regards small nations simply as nuisances. He maintains that they are not worth preserving, and that they merely tempt the great nations to go to war either in order to protect them or in order to subjugate them. There is no use in talking, as he does, of abolishing small nations, however; they refuse to be abolished. And, if they could be abolished, how much poorer a place the world would be without theml In this machine age we- are often told of the danger that machinery may extinguish human personality and end by producing a world of Robots. Well, we don’t want a world of Robot nations without personality any more than we want a nation of Robot citizens. And we shall not have such a world so long as national anthems persist. Of all the national anthems in existence the noblest, I think, is the Dutch. Its music is the expression of an invincible stubborhness of faith which, as one listens to it, convinces one that the Dutch nation, though it may for a time be submerged, can never perish. The Marseillaise ’ is more aggressive—an inspiring song with the light of battle in its eyes—and we may be sure that it. will still be sung when the rise of the Nazis is remembered only as a longpast disaster in the history of Europe. As for the Germans themselves, they have one of the loveliest of airs in ‘Deutschland Über Alios,’ and if, as they sang it, they meant “ Germany first of all in the hearts of her people ” instead of “ Germany dominating the rest of the world,” there would be no reason to 'quarrel with it. I was surprised to read the other day,by the way, that towards the end of the last war, the Germans were looking for a new national anthem. There were apparently at that time three German national anthems, that of Prussia being a song of which the words were borrowed from Denmark and the music was that of the British ‘ God Save the King.’ Naturally, the Pan-Germans objected to, expressing their patriotic feelings through what they called “ an English tune.” Nor were they entirely satisfied with ‘ Deutschland Über Alles,’ a revolutionary song, written in the ’forties of last century in a British possession by a German who had been driven into exile for his anti-militarist opinions. Hence thev organised a National Committee for a New German National Anthem, and 3,200 poems were submitted to the unfortunate adjudicators. All of them apparently fairly bad. Since then they have had the * Horst Wessel.’ which, whatever its sentiments, is certainly an excellent tune. In the Austrian Republic, destroyed by Hitler, there were for a time four rival national anthems, every party, from the Socialists to the Pan-Germans, haying one of its own. As a result, when one of the national anthems was played on public occasions, rival versions were sung by different sections of the audience. At a meeting of Clericals one day a gramophone record of the Socialist anthem was turned on by mistake, and tho riot that resulted had to be quelled by the police. The explanation of the mistakewas that the gramophone record contained the Socialist anthem on one side and the old Imperial anthem on the other, and that it had been accidentally turned wrong side up. The moral of this is that blessed is the nation that has only one national anthem. In unitv of memory, in unity of aspirations, in unity of devotion to freedom, it possesses those things that make for survival. Nations thus united draw life from their national songs.