Expectans Expectavi ( I have waited)

John wrote - For me it needed something special, and not so easy to find.  Something to sustain me through three lockdowns, with talks that the new variants on their way may not have the same road map as we have.
That 'find' was Charles Hamilton Sorley's Expectans Expectavi.  Charles was a Scottish poet.  He barely had time to complete his education before being sent to his doom on the battlefields of World War One.  Charles died on the 13th October 1915, aged 20 years old.  Still a boy.   As the Battle of Loos raged around him, a German sniper’s bullet to the head claimed his life.   The poems he wrote are regarded by many literary critics as some of the most important written by the famous war poets.  His name is one of only sixteen inscribed on a stone of slate which sits in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey, recently opened for Covid-19 vaccinations
The last two stanzas of Expectans Expectavi were set to music in1919 and became an anthem which every chorister in the land knows well.   
​This sanctuary of my soul,
Unwitting I keep white and whole,
Unlatch'd and lit, if thou should'st care
To enter or to tarry there.
​
With parted lips and outstretch'd hands
And list'ning ears Thy servant stands,
Call Thou early, call Thou late,
To Thy great service dedicate.
My soul, keep white, and whole.
I had always assumed that was it, the finished works.  Nothing could have prepared me, when in lock down, I found it was only half of Charles' posthumously published poem. The person who wrote this poem was young, and he did so in the most extreme circumstances; witnessing carnage and horrors which we could never imagine
​The opening description of this poem is of normal life, which we are all so familiar with, and its innocence.  The first three stanzas are so remote from Charles' daily struggles for survival, as he describes lives which had never seen -  War.  This very simplicity is a counterbalance to the stench of death Charles has as his companion.  This is Charles telling us to grab ''with outstretched hands'' every precious moment of what is ordinary, if our minds are to stay healthy during this lockdown.  
From morn to midnight, all day through,
I laugh and play as others do,
I sin and chatter, just the same
As others with a different name.

And all year long upon the stage
I dance and tumble and do rage
So vehemently, I scarcely see
The inner and eternal me.
​
I have a temple I do not
Visit, a heart I have forgot,
A self that I have never met,
A secret shrine -- and yet, and yet.