BD. Edmund Blunden

48. In the Margin. Listener 19 (January 1938): 186.

Blunden’s only comment in verse about Japanese militarism. The speaker notes that ‘few men praise and hardly more defend’ the ‘armed power’ of Japan; he feels ‘Horror and wonder at the deeds thus done, / And fear[s] each day’s exploit of thundering steel / Only destroys what old Japan has won’. Still, he hopes that we may not forget ‘much that belongs / To that great name “Japan”’, for ‘Through crowded streets gray-headed virtue goes’ and ‘from poor farms’ we may hear ‘old peaceful songs’. Reprinted in 165 and, under the title While few men praise and hardly more defend, in On Several Occasions (London: Corvius, 1939).