Parta Quies

Good-night; ensured release,
Imperishable peace,
   Have these for yours,
While sea abides, and land,
And earth’s foundations stand,
   And heaven endures.

When earth’s foundations flee,
Nor sky nor land nor sea
   At all is found,
Content you, let them burn:
It is not your concern;
   Sleep on, sleep sound.

– A. E.  Housman (1859-1936), English Romantic poet and professor of Latin at Cambridge

V: The Soldier, from The War Sonnets

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


-- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) English poet and sailor who died of sepsis in 1915 on his way to Gallipoli and is buried in Greece; his lone brother was killed in action in 1917 after 19 days on the Western Front.

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

--Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Scots poet and novelist