Even younger than Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley was only 20 when he was killed in 1915, leaving just 37 complete poems, including this bitter sonnet. His posthumous collection, Marlborough and Other Poems (1916), was popular in the 1920s. Robert Graves championed his verse when it fell into neglect.
WHEN YOU SEE MILLIONS OF THE
MOUTHLESS DEAD
By Charles Hamilton Sorley
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this,'They are dead.' Then add thereto,
'Yet many a better one has died before.'
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
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