A poem I like

It's not easy to access online so I thought I would make it easier. It is a poem about WWI

The Misfit

By C. Day. Lewis


At the training depot that first morning

When the west-country draft came forth on parade —

Mechanics, labourers, men of trade

Herded with shouts like boneheaded cattle —

One stood out from the maul

Who least of them all

Looked metal for killing or meat for the butchery blade.


He wore a long black cutaway coat

Which should have been walking by blackthorn-fleeced

Hedges to church; and good as a feast

Was the spare, wild face much weather had flavoured.

A shepherd or ploughman

I thought, or a cowman —

One with a velvet hand for all manner of beast.


I cannot forget how he stood, bemused,

With the meek eye of a driven thing

But a solitude old as a cromlech ring

Was around him; a freeborn air of the downland,

A peace of deep combes

No world-anger consumes

Marked him off from the herd to be branded for soldiering.


I saw him not after. Is he now buried

Far from pastures buttercup-strewed,

Or tending his beasts again with the same rude

Rightness of instinct which then had brought him

So quaintly dressed In his Sunday best

For the first step along the Calvary road?