Wilfred Owen’s “The Send-Off” is among the most restrained and devastating poems of the First World War. Rather than presenting battle, mutilation, or death in the immediate sensory violence familiar from some of Owen’s best-known work, it focuses on an earlier and apparently quieter moment: the departure of soldiers from a provincial railway siding. Yet this is not a scene of uncomplicated patriotism, communal pride, or heroic ceremony. Owen turns the conventional military farewell into something furtive, ominous, and morally compromised. The poem’s extraordinary power lies in its ability to make departure itself feel like a kind of death, while treating return as an almost unimaginable, diminished possibility. It is a poem about men being removed from the social world, about civilians who half-see and fail to see what is happening, and about the machinery of modern war proceeding with impersonal efficiency. Its emotional force comes not from overt lamentation but from compression, irony, and a haunting awareness of all that cannot be said publicly.

Owen wrote from the historical catastrophe of the Great War, a conflict that transformed both warfare and the language available for describing it. The mass mobilizations of 1914–18 brought millions of men from towns, villages, factories, farms, and offices into military service. Railways became indispensable instruments of the war machine, carrying troops, ammunition, supplies, and wounded bodies between the civilian home front and distant theatres of combat. For those left behind, the railway station could become a threshold between ordinary life and the incomprehensible world of the front. Owen’s “siding-shed,” however, is not a grand metropolitan terminus surrounded by flags and cheering crowds. It is a marginal, industrial, almost hidden place. A siding is a secondary railway track, a space of waiting, storage, and diversion. By locating the men there, Owen immediately suggests that they are being moved out of public sight, treated as units in a logistical process rather than as citizens whose lives demand collective attention.

The poem begins with movement through “close, darkening lanes,” a phrase that establishes both physical confinement and moral atmosphere. “Close” may indicate narrowness, but it also conveys stuffiness, pressure, and a lack of escape. The lanes darken as the men proceed, so that their route appears to lead away from light, openness, and domestic familiarity. This is not the broad road of romantic military adventure. It is a constricted passage into obscurity. The soldiers “sang their way,” and the phrase might at first seem to offer a note of comradeship or courage. Military song has long served to create solidarity, regulate marching, and suppress fear. Yet Owen’s surrounding diction destabilizes the apparent cheerfulness. Their singing occurs beneath gathering darkness, on the way to a concealed railway shed, and among faces that are “grimly gay.” The men’s gaiety is not spontaneous happiness but a performance under pressure: an effort to maintain masculine composure when the future is terrifyingly uncertain.

The phrase “grimly gay” is one of Owen’s characteristically compact emotional paradoxes. In the idiom of the period, “gay” carries the sense of cheerful or spirited, while “grimly” introduces determination, severity, and the proximity of death. The soldiers’ faces register a divided condition: they may laugh, sing, or display courage, but the emotional truth beneath the public gesture is grimness. This doubleness is central to Owen’s understanding of wartime feeling. War demands that men enact morale; it rewards the outward signs of confidence even when inwardly they are afraid. The poem does not mock the departing soldiers for this performance. On the contrary, its sympathy lies partly in recognizing the necessity of it. Their gaiety is an improvised defense against what they cannot control. At the same time, the phrase reveals how a culture of patriotic celebration can conceal the mortal danger toward which these men are being sent.

The image of flowers pinned to the soldiers’ chests makes this danger unmistakable. Their “breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray / As men’s are, dead.” The floral decorations belong, presumably, to the rituals of farewell: women, family members, or local supporters have given the soldiers wreaths and sprays as tokens of affection, honor, and patriotic blessing. Flowers conventionally signify beauty, fertility, celebration, and love. Owen exposes a darker ritual latent within them. White flowers placed on men’s breasts resemble the funeral adornment of corpses. The word “stuck” is deliberately ungracious. It does not suggest a tender pinning-on but something attached mechanically, even forcibly. Owen thereby makes the ceremonial gesture seem less like a blessing than an anticipatory burial rite. The men leave alive, singing and decorated, but they are visually imagined as already dead.

This striking transformation of flowers draws attention to the intimate connection between civilian idealism and military death. The women who give flowers may be sincere; the poem does not portray them as malicious. Indeed, their gifts embody the loving sentiments available to those who have not experienced combat. Yet Owen shows how inadequate such sentiments can become when they are attached to men being dispatched into industrial slaughter. The white floral decoration becomes an emblem of tragic innocence. It is beautiful, but its beauty cannot protect the soldiers. It may even intensify the irony, because it turns their bodies into ceremonial objects before war has done its work. In Owen’s poetry more broadly, conventional symbols of religion, romance, and national honor repeatedly prove incapable of accommodating the physical realities of the trenches. “The Send-Off” presents this crisis with particular quietness: the flowers are not grotesque in themselves, but the comparison to the dead makes their significance impossible to evade.

The poem’s observers deepen its critique of the civilian world. “Dull porters watched them,” while “a casual tramp / Stood staring hard.” The adjectives are carefully chosen. The porters are “dull,” perhaps emotionally blank, perhaps wearied by routine, perhaps simply unable or unwilling to respond to the gravity of what they witness. They belong to the railway infrastructure, the ordinary laboring world that continues alongside the departure. The tramp, by contrast, is “casual”: a figure without stable employment, property, or obvious institutional allegiance. He stands outside the respectable rituals of patriotic society, and paradoxically he is the person who seems most attentive. His hard stare implies an unsoftened recognition of reality. He is “sorry to miss them from the upland camp,” an ambiguous phrase that suggests he has seen the soldiers before, perhaps as part of the local landscape of wartime training. His sorrow may be genuine, but it also possesses the helplessness of spectatorship. He can watch them go; he cannot alter their destination.

These marginal witnesses matter because Owen’s poem is profoundly concerned with failures of communal responsibility. The soldiers are visible enough to be watched, but not truly known. The porters, the tramp, the guard, and the women with flowers are all connected to the departure, yet none shares the men’s fate. The civilian world remains adjacent to war, not identical with it. In this sense, the poem challenges the comforting notion that a nation at war acts as one unified body. The men are taken from their communities, but those communities cannot follow them into the experience that awaits. Owen does not merely contrast soldiers and civilians; he dramatizes the painful incompleteness of their contact. There are gestures, stares, floral offerings, and routine railway signals, but there is no genuine language sufficient to bridge the gulf.

The railway apparatus itself acquires a disquieting animation. “Signals nodded, and a lamp / Winked to the guard.” These gestures sound almost companionable: a nod and a wink are familiar signs exchanged between people. Yet the human warmth of the language is bitterly ironic, since the signals and lamp are inanimate devices. Their personification makes the machinery seem more communicative and purposeful than the people around it. The system knows what to do. It gives its coded instructions, and the train moves. Meanwhile, the soldiers’ destination remains undisclosed to the public, and their emotions remain largely unspoken. Owen’s image evokes the modern war as an administrative and technological apparatus whose operations are smooth, secretive, and indifferent to individual life. The lamp’s “wink” may also imply complicity, as though the railway itself shares a knowing gesture with authority while ordinary witnesses remain excluded from knowledge.

The transition to “So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went” brings the poem’s moral argument into sharp focus. Secrecy was, of course, a practical feature of wartime troop movement. Military information could not be freely broadcast, and the destination of units might be withheld for strategic reasons. Owen acknowledges that historical reality, but his simile does much more than record it. To compare the departure to “wrongs hushed-up” is to suggest guilt, shame, and deliberate suppression. A wrong may be concealed because it would arouse condemnation if exposed. The phrase therefore invites readers to ask what is being hidden: the men’s destination, the scale of anticipated losses, the actual conditions of combat, or the broader injustice of sending them away. Owen does not reduce war to a simple private crime, but he does imply that official secrecy can protect a public system from moral scrutiny.

“They were not ours” is among the poem’s most piercing declarations. Grammatically simple, it is emotionally and politically complex. The pronoun “ours” might be expected to express communal possession and responsibility: these are our sons, brothers, neighbors, workmates, and friends. Yet the phrase negates that relationship. Once the soldiers enter the war machine, they become estranged from the community that produced them. The statement may be read as a confession of civilian failure: “we” did not hold onto them, did not know them, and did not claim responsibility for what was done to them. It may also expose the impersonal logic of military organization, which turns local men into anonymous personnel transferred to an unspecified front. Owen’s use of “we” does not allow the reader to remain comfortably outside this condition. The poem implicates the wider society in the abandonment it describes.

The ensuing admission, “We never heard to which front these were sent,” reinforces the sense of detachment. The word “front” is itself impersonal military shorthand. It identifies a zone of operation rather than a human place, and its vagueness mirrors the public’s incomplete knowledge. The men have individual histories, but the poem does not name them; their destination, too, remains unnamed. Such anonymity is not a poetic deficiency but a central subject. Mass war converts persons into numbers, units, and replacements. It also produces a peculiar kind of disappearance before physical death. The soldiers vanish from local knowledge. Owen makes that vanishing palpable through the quietness of the poem’s middle movement. There is no grand announcement, no spectacular farewell, and no clear narrative of where they go. They simply pass beyond the community’s field of vision.

The poem’s most unsettling question concerns whether the soldiers will “yet mock what women meant / Who gave them flowers.” The word “yet” carries several possible pressures. It may mean “still,” asking whether they preserve enough of their former selves to understand and perhaps mock the innocence of the gifts. It may also mean “eventually,” pointing toward a future in which combat experience changes their response to tenderness. “Mock” is not necessarily cruel laughter. It may imply bitter disbelief, the scornful reaction of men who have seen realities that render ceremonial patriotism unbearable. Owen recognizes that war does not only kill. It can alter the survivor’s relation to love, beauty, and social ritual. A flower offered as an emblem of care may come to seem painfully naive after the trenches. The poem thus anticipates psychological injury without naming it in modern clinical terms. The men may return with their capacity for easy participation in civilian meanings fundamentally damaged.

This concern with altered perception places “The Send-Off” in conversation with Owen’s larger poetic project. Poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” attack inherited patriotic language by setting it against the suffering of exhausted soldiers and gas casualties. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” questions the adequacy of religious and ceremonial mourning in the face of mechanized mass death. “The Send-Off” is less spectacular than either, but its critique is no less profound. It examines the social rituals that precede combat rather than the carnage that follows. Its flowers, singing, and possible bells belong to a culture that seeks noble forms for military sacrifice. Owen does not deny the sincerity of grief, affection, or courage; rather, he reveals the terrible mismatch between these inherited forms and the devastation produced by modern warfare. This is one reason his poetry has remained so compelling: it does not merely denounce war abstractly but examines how ordinary language, habits, and ceremonies become entangled in it.

Owen’s own life gives the poem a particular authority, though its achievement exceeds biography. He enlisted in 1915 and served on the Western Front, where he encountered the cold, exhaustion, bombardment, injury, and terror that shaped his mature work. His friendship with Siegfried Sassoon was especially important to his development, encouraging both poetic confidence and a sharper willingness to confront the falsifications of public war rhetoric. Owen was killed in November 1918, just before the Armistice, and his death has made the elegiac dimensions of his work especially poignant. Yet it would be limiting to treat “The Send-Off” simply as testimony from a doomed soldier. Its intelligence lies in the way it imagines multiple perspectives: the departing men, the women, the railway workers, the tramp, and the community left in ignorance. Owen’s personal experience enables a social vision rather than narrowing the poem to private feeling.

The final movement asks whether the soldiers will return “to beatings of great bells / In wild trainloads.” This image evokes the anticipated public celebration of victory. Bells traditionally announce religious festivals, royal occasions, weddings, and communal rejoicing; their “beatings” here would welcome returning troops. “Wild trainloads” suggests crowds of survivors arriving in an exhilarating rush. For a moment, the question allows the possibility of restoration: the train that took the men away might bring them home amid noise, gratitude, and collective joy. But Owen immediately undercuts this ceremonial fantasy. “A few, a few, too few for drums and yells” is one of the most devastating instances of verbal reduction in war poetry. The repetition shrinks the imagined multitude into a tragically scant remainder. Public celebration requires a crowd, spectacle, and noise; the returnees are too few to sustain those rituals honestly.

The phrase “too few for drums and yells” also raises an ethical question about commemoration. Drums and yells can honor courage, but they can also drown out the individual sorrow of loss. Owen’s refusal of triumphant noise is not merely pessimistic; it is an insistence that the scale of absence cannot be redeemed by pageantry. The survivors may deserve welcome, but their return cannot reverse what has happened. In contrast to the loud public expectation of bells and cheering, they “may creep back, silent.” “Creep” is an astonishingly painful verb. It suggests physical weakness, caution, shame, invisibility, or the furtive movement of those who do not feel entitled to occupy public space. The men who once sang through dark lanes do not return singing. They are reduced not necessarily in moral stature but in bodily and emotional confidence. War has made even homecoming difficult.

The final image of “still village wells / Up half-known roads” gathers the poem’s themes into a landscape of estrangement. Wells are ancient communal sites, associated with water, sustenance, domestic routine, memory, and the continuity of village life. Their stillness is profoundly ambiguous. It may suggest peace after noise and violence; it may also suggest stagnation, silence, and a world untouched by the experiences of those who return. The roads are “half-known,” not wholly unfamiliar, because the soldiers are returning to their own places. Yet they are no longer fully known because war has transformed the travelers’ perception. This is a subtle and powerful account of alienation. The home itself has not necessarily changed beyond recognition, but the returned soldier has. Familiar geography becomes uncanny when one carries memories that cannot easily be shared.

In this ending, Owen approaches a philosophical insight central to much literature of war: survival is not the same as restoration. The survivors have escaped death, but they have not simply resumed the lives interrupted by enlistment. Their silence may contain trauma, grief for those left behind, resentment toward civilian misunderstanding, or a recognition that the self who departed cannot wholly return. The “half-known roads” also suggest that communities may fail to recognize them. The men have become strangers not only to home but potentially to the people who welcome them. This idea has broad resonance beyond the First World War. Across cultures and conflicts, veterans often confront the difficulty of translating extreme experience into ordinary social life. Owen’s poem remains moving because it understands this difficulty without turning it into melodrama. Its silence is more eloquent than explicit explanation could be.

“The Send-Off” is therefore a poem of thresholds: between village and front, youth and experience, public ceremony and private dread, departure and disappearance, return and non-return. Its artistry depends on a continual contrast between surfaces and realities. Singing masks fear; flowers anticipate funerals; railway signals perform a cold, almost human efficiency; a possible celebration becomes a vision of too few men returning quietly; home becomes only half familiar. Owen’s language is admirably economical, but each image opens into a large moral and emotional field. The poem condemns no individual woman for giving flowers, no porter for watching, no soldier for singing. Its deeper target is a system and a culture that allow human beings to be sent away under signs of honor while withholding the full truth of what is being asked of them.

What makes the poem so emotionally resonant is its refusal to convert suffering into a consoling story. There is no clear heroic climax, no certain reunion, and no grand patriotic resolution. Instead, Owen leaves readers with a small number of silent figures moving toward still wells by roads that they only partly recognize. That conclusion does not diminish the soldiers; it restores to them a fragile humanity that military spectacle threatens to erase. The poem asks us to look carefully at the moment when people become casualties before they are counted as such, and to recognize that the cost of war extends into memory, language, intimacy, and place. In its quiet grief and exacting moral imagination, “The Send-Off” remains a magnificent example of poetry’s capacity to make historical catastrophe intimate, visible, and unforgettable.

Barry Cornwall’s The Hunter’s Song is a vibrant, kinetic celebration of the English hunting tradition, rendered with an almost Homeric vigor and lyrical exuberance. Composed in the early nineteenth century—a period marked by Romanticism’s fascination with nature, individual agency, and the sublime—the poem channels the spirit of a bygone aristocratic pastime while simultaneously infusing it with a democratic energy that transcends class. Though ostensibly a paean to the chase, the work operates on multiple registers: as a sensory immersion in the natural world, as a meditation on human vitality and freedom, and as a cultural artifact reflecting the values and aesthetics of its historical moment. Through dynamic imagery, rhythmic propulsion, and a masterful orchestration of sound, Cornwall crafts not merely a hunting song but a mythic invocation of embodied joy, temporal immediacy, and the harmonious interplay between man, beast, and landscape.

Historically, the poem emerges from a milieu in which fox hunting had evolved from a practical necessity into a highly ritualized social institution, particularly among the landed gentry of England. By the Regency and early Victorian eras, the hunt was less about pest control or sustenance than about spectacle, status, and communal identity. Yet Cornwall, writing under his pen name (his real name was Bryan Waller Procter), does not simply endorse this elite practice; rather, he abstracts it into something more universal—a metaphor for the exhilaration of being fully alive in the present moment. The poem thus occupies a liminal space between nostalgia and immediacy, between the specific customs of a historical subculture and the timeless human desire for motion, mastery, and communion with the wild. This duality allows the poem to resonate beyond its immediate context, speaking to any reader who has ever felt the pulse of adrenaline in pursuit of a goal, however fleeting.

Culturally, The Hunter’s Song reflects the Romantic era’s complex relationship with nature. While poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge often portrayed nature as a source of spiritual solace or moral instruction, Cornwall presents it as a stage for action, a realm where human energy meets elemental force. The natural world here is neither passive nor purely contemplative; it is animate, responsive, and participatory. Dew “hangs thick” on thorns, frost “shrinks back like a beaten hound,” clouds “flow” with oceanic grandeur, and the ground itself “steams” with latent heat. These images do not merely describe a setting—they enact a drama. Nature is not backdrop but co-actor, and the hunter moves through it not as conqueror but as participant in a larger, rhythmic cycle. This aligns with certain strands of Romantic thought that emphasized the unity of human and natural forces, though Cornwall’s tone is notably more robust and less introspective than that of his contemporaries. There is no brooding solitude here, no melancholic reflection—only the urgent, joyous imperative to rise, ride, and respond to the call of the horn.

The poem’s emotional impact derives largely from its relentless forward momentum, achieved through a combination of syntactic urgency, kinetic verbs, and strategic repetition. From the opening command—“Rise! Sleep no more!”—the reader is swept into a world of motion and sensory immediacy. The language is muscular and percussive: hunters go “over the high lands, and over the low,” they fly “away,—away!” like hawks, they “bound” like stags. Each verb propels the narrative forward, creating a sense of breathless exhilaration that mirrors the physical experience of the chase. This is poetry not as static artifact but as embodied rhythm, designed to be felt in the pulse as much as understood by the mind. The repeated refrain—“The horn,—the horn! / The merry, sweet ring of the hunter’s horn”—functions not only as a structural anchor but as an auditory motif that binds the poem together, evoking both the literal sound that drives the hunt and the symbolic call to awaken to life’s possibilities.

Cornwall’s use of literary devices further amplifies this effect. Simile abounds, yet each comparison serves a precise thematic purpose. The frost retreating “like a beaten hound” anthropomorphizes the natural world while subtly foreshadowing the central conflict of the chase. The speaker departing “like a dart from the Tartar’s bow” invokes exotic, martial imagery that elevates the hunter’s departure to the level of epic action. Later, the hunter is likened to a hawk “full at its prey,” emphasizing focus, precision, and predatory grace. These similes do not merely decorate; they deepen the poem’s mythic resonance, casting the hunt as a primal, almost archetypal endeavor. The comparison to the “wild stag” is particularly telling: by aligning the hunter with the very creatures he pursues, Cornwall blurs the boundary between pursuer and pursued, suggesting a shared animality, a common participation in the rhythms of the wild.

Sound, too, is meticulously orchestrated. Beyond the obvious centrality of the horn, the poem is rich in onomatopoeia and alliteration that mimic the textures of the hunt. The “steaming, steaming ground” evokes both visual haze and auditory sibilance; “fringed thorn” and “stubble corn” create a tactile crunch in the mouth. The repeated “hark, hark!” functions as both aural cue and metapoetic device—it calls the reader to attention just as the horn calls the hunters to action. This self-reflexivity is subtle but significant: the poem itself becomes a kind of horn, summoning its audience into its world. The exclamatory tone throughout (“So, ho!” “Away!” “Sound! Sound the horn!”) further enhances this immersive quality, transforming the reader from observer into participant.

Thematically, the poem explores the interplay between freedom and discipline, spontaneity and structure. The hunter’s joy is not unbounded chaos; it is channeled through skill, equipment, and tradition. Note the precise details: “stirrups short,” “snaffle strong,” “swift, sure, silent hounds.” These are not incidental; they signify mastery, preparation, and respect for the craft. The delight the hunter experiences is thus earned—it arises from competence, from the harmony between rider, horse, and hound. In this sense, the poem offers a vision of freedom that is deeply embodied and technically grounded, a counterpoint to more abstract notions of liberty. It suggests that true exhilaration lies not in escape from constraint but in the perfect alignment of will, body, and environment. This resonates with philosophical ideas about eudaimonia—flourishing through virtuous activity—as articulated by Aristotle, though Cornwall renders it not through argument but through sensory enactment.

Moreover, the poem engages with temporality in a striking way. The hunt spans from “noble morn” to “set of sun,” framing the day as a complete arc of action and fulfillment. Morning is not just a time of day but a state of being—awake, alert, responsive. The final stanza’s injunction to “dream till morn / Of the bold, sweet sound of the hunter’s horn” suggests that the memory of the chase sustains the spirit through the night, turning experience into enduring inner music. This cyclical structure implies that the hunt is not merely an event but a rhythm of life, recurring and renewing. The horn, then, becomes a symbol not just of the chase but of the human capacity to find meaning and joy in disciplined engagement with the world.

Comparatively, The Hunter’s Song stands apart from other Romantic treatments of rural life. Unlike Clare’s elegiac laments for lost landscapes or Tennyson’s melancholic idylls, Cornwall’s poem is unapologetically celebratory. It shares with Byron a certain swagger and physicality, yet lacks Byron’s irony or cynicism. It is closer in spirit to the folk ballad tradition—particularly those celebrating Robin Hood or border reivers—in its emphasis on communal action, speed, and valor. Yet it is also distinctly modern in its psychological immediacy; the focus is not on external glory but on internal sensation. The hunter’s joy is private even as it is shared, intimate even as it is performative. This duality makes the poem feel both communal and deeply personal, a rare balance in lyric poetry.

Biographically, Barry Cornwall’s position as a London-based poet with strong literary connections (he was friends with Lamb, Hazlitt, and Keats) situates him at the intersection of urban intellectual life and rural nostalgia. Though not a country squire himself, he channels the ethos of the hunt with convincing authenticity, suggesting either firsthand experience or deep cultural absorption. His choice to write under a pseudonym derived from his mother’s Cornish lineage further indicates a desire to root his poetic identity in regional tradition, even as he participated in metropolitan literary circles. This tension between center and periphery, modernity and tradition, may inform the poem’s energetic synthesis of classical form and folk vitality.

Philosophically, the poem can be read as an affirmation of what Nietzsche would later call the Dionysian—the ecstatic, embodied, life-affirming impulse that resists abstraction and embraces flux. The hunter does not seek to understand the fox or the landscape; he seeks to move through them, to become one with their energy. There is no moral judgment here, no ethical quandary about the killing of the fox (which is mentioned almost parenthetically: “When the red fox dies, and—the day is done!”). The focus is on the process, not the outcome; on the journey, not the destination. In this light, the poem becomes less about hunting per se and more about the human need for ritualized intensity, for moments in which time collapses into pure presence. The horn, then, is the call to such moments—a sonic embodiment of carpe diem.

Yet this is not mere hedonism. The discipline required—the “short stirrups,” the “strong snaffle”—suggests that true joy is inseparable from responsibility and skill. The poem thus avoids the pitfalls of romanticizing recklessness; instead, it celebrates a form of virtuoso living, in which excellence and pleasure are intertwined. This aligns with classical ideals of aretē (excellence) as much as with Romantic individualism. The hunter is not a rebel but a practitioner, and his song is one of mastery as much as of mirth.

In its emotional resonance, The Hunter’s Song achieves a rare feat: it captures the intoxicating blend of danger, beauty, and camaraderie that defines many peak human experiences. The reader feels the chill of morning dew, the thunder of hooves, the sharp clarity of the horn cutting through mist. But more than that, the poem evokes the inner state of total absorption—the flow state in which self and world merge, and time seems suspended. This is why the horn’s sound lingers in memory, why it becomes “the sound of all sounds.” It represents not just a noise but a mode of being: alert, engaged, alive.

Ultimately, Barry Cornwall’s poem endures not because it documents a historical pastime but because it taps into a perennial human longing—to move with purpose, to feel the wind in one’s face, to answer a call that pulls us out of sleep and into the vividness of the world. In an age increasingly mediated by screens and schedules, the poem’s raw physicality feels both nostalgic and urgently relevant. It reminds us that joy can be found not in withdrawal but in full-throated participation, not in stillness but in motion. And though the red fox may die, and the day may end, the echo of the horn remains—a testament to the enduring power of poetry to summon us, again and again, to rise.