Pain
Pain, pain continual; pain unending; Hard even to the roughest, but to those Hungry for beauty . . . Not the wisest knows, Nor most pitiful-hearted, what the wending Of one hour’s way meant. Grey monotony lending 5 Weight to the grey skies, grey mud where goes An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows Careless at last of cruellest Fate-sending. Seeing the pitiful eyes of men foredone, Or horses shot, too tired merely to stir, 10 Dying in shell-holes both, slain by the mud. Men broken, shrieking even to hear a gun. — Till pain grinds down, or lethargy numbs her, The amazed heart cries angrily out on God. Fate-sending — Of course, fate is often described as cruel, but here cruellest modifies not Fate but the compound word Fate-sending. Thus, not fate itself but the act of sending or inflicting the fate is the cruellest part. Who or what is doing the sending is, for the moment at least, left unstated. foredone — an archaic word that originally meant killed formed from for and the past participle of do. One can read this as a more poetic form of done for; you may have heard the idiom used in a phrase like he’s done for. Alternatively, especially because the word was more often spelled fordone, we can read this as a combination of fore, as in before, and done, suggesting that these men are in effect dead too soon, or that they are still alive but doomed, in effect the walking dead. both — that is, both men and horses her — This pronoun does not refer to an antecedent, but instead looks ahead to The amazed heart, this personifying it as female. Of course, using the pronoun before the word to which it refers creates a momentary sense of mystery or anticipation, especially because the feminine pronoun is a surprise in this context. on — note the choice of preposition over the more conventional to