LANCE CORPORAL REGINALD ARTHUR PHILIP READ
ROYAL AIR FORCE
10TH JULY 1918 AGE 17
BURIED: NEWHAVEN CEMETERY, SUSSEX, UK
This is so obviously a quotation and yet it was incredibly difficult to find the poem it came from. Eventually I found it published on 17 December 1917 in the New Castle Herald, a local paper from New Castle, Pennsylvania, USA. It's not exactly a quotation but a contraction of two lines. Quite how the poem was known to Reginald Read's mother, who at the time she chose it was living in Broadstone, Dorset, I don't know.
It appeared in a published sermon written by the Revd MB Williams of the First Methodist Episcopal Church. Williams was inspired by the publication of a young soldier's last letter home in which he told his parents that he was happy to die as "we shall live forever as the result of our efforts". I've copied out the whole of the poem, which is not great poetry nor even very comprehensible but you are unlikely to find it anywhere else:
What chaunt is this that thou dost sing,
Beside the shadow of the Wing
And marked for Victory and for Sting -
"But we shall live forever!"
What rose of wonder hast thou prest
With a gold pin to thy young breast
That in such pride thou goest dreast? -
"But we shall live forever!"
Thou saws't the Earth and all her spires,
Dreams and dominions and desires,
Fade from thee: and thy heart still quires,
"But we shall live forever!"
And while into the dark thou'rt flung
By irremediable wrong,
Yet boasteth thy submissive tongue,
"But we shall live forever!"
O child, O stripling, O dead boy,
That on the threshold of thy joy
Beheld the godness past the toy,
So shalt thou live forever!
Oh such as thou, men shall record:
"They break the terror of the sword
And built the garden of the Lord
And 'stablished it forever".
Reginald Read, the son of Albert Read, a ship's steward, and his wife Jessie, was born in Newhaven in October 1900. He joined the RAF in July 1917 whilst still only 16. He went to the RAF Boys Wing Training Establishment at Cranwell in Lincolnshire where he achieved the rank of Acting Lance Corporal before he died of pneumonia in hospital in Lincoln. His body was returned to Newhaven to be buried.