Let these memorials built of stone — music’s
enduring instrument, of many centuries of
patient cultivation of the earth, of English
verse
be joined with the memory of this defence of
the islands
and the memory of those appointed to the grey
ships — battleship, merchantman, trawler —
contributing their share to the ages’ pavement
of British bone on the sea floor
and of those who, in man’s newest form of gamble
with death, fight the power of darkness in air
and fire
and of those who have followed their forebears
to Flanders and France, those undefeated in de-
feat, unalterable in triumph, changing nothing
of their ancestors’ ways but the weapons
and those again for whom the paths of glory are
the lanes and the streets of Britain:
to say, to the past and the future generations
of our kin and of our speech, that we took up
our positions, in obedience to instructions.