To gaze at you, to weep for happiness, to know
    That I am your son and that you are there.

    Nothing at all but for a moment when all is still,
    Noon! to be with you, Marie, in this place where you are.

    To say nothing, to gaze upon your face,
    To let the heart sing in its own speech.’

There the nationalist passion of Claudel animates his Catholic religion, yet does not break through its confines.  But sometimes the strain of suffering and ruin is too intense for Christian submission, and he takes his God to task truculently for not doing his part in the contract; we are his partner in running the world, and see, he is asleep!

     ’There is a great alliance, willy-nilly, between us henceforth, there
                is this bread that with no trembling hand
      We have offered you, this wine that we have poured anew,
    Our tears that you have gathered, our brothers that you share with us,
                leaving the seed in the earth,
      There is this living sacrifice of which we satisfy each day’s demand,
      This chalice we have drunk with you!’

Yet the devout passion emerges again, with notes of piercing pathos: 

    ’Lord, who hast promised us for one glass of water a boundless sea,
        Who knows if Thou art not thirsty too? 
    And that this blood, which is all we have, will quench that thirst
                in Thee,
        We know, for Thou hast told us so. 
    If indeed there is a spring in us, well, that is what is to be shown,
        If this wine of ours is red,
    If our blood has virtue, as Thou sayest, how can it be known
        Otherwise than by being shed?’

(4) Effects of the War upon Poetry

Thus could the great Catholic poet sing under pressure of the supreme national crisis of his country.  Poetry at such times may become a great national instrument—­a trumpet whence Milton or Wordsworth, Arndt or Whitman, blow soul-animating strains.  The war of 1914 was for all the belligerent peoples far more than a stupendous military event.  It shattered the patterns of our established mentality, and compelled us to seek new adjustments and support in the chaotically disorganized world.  The psychical upheaval was most violent in the English-speaking peoples, where the military shock was least direct; for here a nation of civilians embraced suddenly the new and amazing experience of battle.  Here too, the imaginatively sensitive minds who interpret life through poetry, and most of all the youngest and freshest among them, themselves shared in the glories and the throes of the fight as hardly one of the signers of our most stirring battle poetry had ever done before.  How did this new and amazing experience react upon their poetry?  This, our final question, is perhaps the crucial one in considering the tendencies of recent European poetry.