Note 294 — CANTO THE THIRD.
Reading edition
[Autumn had been beforehand with spring in the work of renovation.
"Yet Nature everywhere resumed her course; Low pansies to the sun their purple gave, And the soft poppy blossomed on the grave."
Poet's Pilgrimage, iii. 36.
But the contrast between the continuous action of nature and the doom of the unreturning dead, which does not greatly concern Southey, fills Byron with a fierce desire to sum the price of victory. He flings in the face of the vain-glorious mourners the bitter reality of their abiding loss. It was this prophetic note, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," which sounded in and through Byron's rhetoric to the men of his own generation.]