ArtKramr wrote:

Subject: Night bombers interception....
From: Andrew Chaplin
Date: 7/16/2004 12:16 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

I think the expression you're looking for is also a title to an
excellent book on Canadian war art: A Terrible Beauty.

Yup. Great title.

I am pretty sure Heather Robertson, the author of _A Terrible Beauty :
the art of Canada at war_, pinched it from William Butler Yeats's
"Easter, 1916":

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)