’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,’

do we not feel that the solidarity of England with the English folk and of the English folk with the English soil, is burnt into our imaginations in a new and distinctive way?

But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of nationality.  It infuses something of the more instinctive and rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a passion peculiarly exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest.  Some of the most strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected note of tenderness when they sang their home province.  Mr. Kipling charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the ’wooded, dim, Blue goodness of the Weald’.  And the more strident notes of D’Annunzio’s patriotism are also assuaged by the tenderness and depth of his home feeling.  We read with some apprehension his dedication of La Nave to the god of seas: 

    ’O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
    The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
    It is this living People, by Thy grace
        Who on the sea
    Shall magnify Thy name, who on the sea
    Shall glorify Thy name, who on the sea
    With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
        At the altar-prow,
    Of all earth’s oceans make our sea, O Thou! 
        Amen!

But he dedicated a noble drama, the Figlia d’Iorio, in a different tone, ’To the land of the Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my brother in exile, to my father in his grave, to all my dead and all my race in the mountains and by the sea, I dedicate this song of the ancient blood.’

(2) Democracy

The growth of democratic as of national feeling during the later century naturally produced a plentiful harvest of eloquent utterance in verse.  With this, merely as such, I am not here concerned, even though it be as fine as the Socialist songs of William Morris or Edward Carpenter.  But the Catholic Socialism of Charles Peguy,—­itself an original and, for most of his contemporaries, a bewildering combination—­struck out a no less original poetry,—­a poetry of solidarity.  Peguy’s Socialism, like his Catholicism, was single-souled; he ignored that behind the one was a Party, and behind the other a Church.  It was his bitterest regret that a vast part of humanity was removed beyond the pale of fellowship by eternal damnation.  It was his sublimest thought that the solidarity of man includes the damned.  In his first version of the Jeanne d’Arc mystery, already referred to, he tells how Jesus, crucified,

    Saw not his Mother in tears at the cross-foot
    Below him, saw not Magdalen nor John,
    But wept, dying, only for Judas’ death. 
    The Saviour loved this Judas, and though utterly
    He gave himself, he knew he could not save him.