LIEUTENANT FRANCIS ARTHUR RALFS
ROYAL FUSILERS
16TH SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 22
BURIED: PUCHEVILLERS BRITISH CEMETERY, FRANCE
Francis Ralfs' inscription comes from stanza XXXIX of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Adonais: an Elegy on the Death of John Keats', 1821.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
The poem is an obvious source for those mourning young men dead before their time: they will not grow old as we shall, and fear and grief will not touch them any moew. The lines from next stanza, XL, 'He hath outsoar'd the shadow of our night' were an even more popular inscription. They were used for the novelist Storm Jameson's brother, Second Lieutenant Harold Jameson, who was killed when he crash landed in flames on 5 January 1917.