"If it must be so,let's not weep or complain
If I have failed,or you,or life turned sullen.
We have had these things,they do not come again,
But the flag still flies and the city has not fallen."
-Humbert Wolfe
Found these words on a friend's blog entry.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
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Do you remember what friend's site you found these words on? I am trying to verify the author and whether or not it is the entire poem and do not get much in the way of google results... I will keep trying!
These words were hand-written on a special type of paper and given to me by a friend when I was leaving my Regiment to join the Civil Service on August 8th 1973.I thought they were from Kipling but now know who wrote those beautiful words
Written by an Italian born British Poet and man of words:
Humbert Wolfe
The Deeper Shadow
I have held out my hand, but more than that was needed.
I have held out my heart, and that was not enough.
I have prayed in all your heavens. Did I pray unheeded?
What must I give, what more do you ask of me, love?
I gave you my youth, when youth was all my possession;
I gave you my faith, seeking a greater in you;
there is no place between us two for compassion,
what, my beloved, I ask, would you have me do?
I cannot pretend that it is still southern weather,
with the firefly stars caught in the tamarisk,
or that we are still islanded together
in those pine-scented thoughts as deep as the dusk.
It is daylight now, beloved, and if love will not face
the declaration of the sun, shall we admit
that we, who have been such missionaries of grace,
must now, no longer entrusted, surrender it?
That we must be content to have known all this,
and to go one from another forever allied
by rhythms which will not die in the silences –
a lover in an old dream and his ghostly bride?
If it must be so, let’s not weep nor complain
if I have failed, or you, or life turned sullen.
We have had these things. They do not come again,
but the flag still flies, and the city has not fallen.
Humbert Wolfe, 1925
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