American muse, whose strong and diverse heart

So many men have tried to understand

But only made it smaller with their art,

Because you are as various as your land,

 

As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,

Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,

As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,

And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

 

Swift runner, never captured or subdued,

Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,

That half a hundred hunters have pursued

But never matched their bullets with the dream,

 

Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry

And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.

 

You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost

With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,

The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,

The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,

 

And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns

Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,

The grey Maine rocks—and the war-painted dawns

That break above the Garden of the Gods.

 

The prairie-schooners crawling toward the ore

And the cheap car, parked by the station-door.

 

Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes

Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth

You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,

And you are ruined gardens in the South

 

And bleak New England farms, so winter-white

Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep

The middle grainland where the wind of night

Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.

 

A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag

With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.

 

They tried to fit you with an English song

And clip your speech into the English tale.

But, even from the first, the words went wrong,

The catbird pecked away the nightingale.

 

The homesick men begot high-cheekboned things

Whose wit was whittled with a different sound

And Thames and all the rivers of the kings

Ran into Mississippi and were drowned.

 

They planted England with a stubborn trust.

But the cleft dust was never English dust.

 

Stepchild of every exile from content

And all the disavouched, hard-bitten pack

Shipped overseas to steal a continent

With neither shirts nor honor to their back.

 

Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide,

Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square,

Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride,

Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,

 

The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vain

To make you God and France or God and Spain.

 

These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth.

And each one married with a dream so proud

He never knew it could not be the truth

And that he coupled with a girl of cloud.

 

And now to see you is more difficult yet

Except as an immensity of wheel

Made up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweat

And glittering with the heat of ladled steel.

 

All these you are, and each is partly you,

And none is false, and none is wholly true.

 

So how to see you as you really are,

So how to suck the pure, distillate, stored

Essence of essence from the hidden star

And make it pierce like a riposting sword.

 

For, as we hunt you down, you must escape

And we pursue a shadow of our own

That can be caught in a magician’s cape

But has the flatness of a painted stone.

 

Never the running stag, the gull at wing,

The pure elixir, the American thing.

 

And yet, at moments when the mind was hot

With something fierier than joy or grief,

When each known spot was an eternal spot

And every leaf was an immortal leaf,

 

I think that I have seen you, not as one,

But clad in diverse semblances and powers,

Always the same, as light falls from the sun,

And always different, as the differing hours.

 

Yet, through each altered garment that you wore

The naked body, shaking the heart’s core.

 

All day the snow fell on that Eastern town

With its soft, pelting, little, endless sigh

Of infinite flakes that brought the tall sky down

Till I could put my hands in the white sky

 

And taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongue

And walk in such a changed and luminous light

As gods inhabit when the gods are young.

All day it fell. And when the gathered night

 

Was a blue shadow cast by a pale glow

I saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow.

 

And I have seen and heard you in the dry

Close-huddled furnace of the city street

When the parched moon was planted in the sky

And the limp air hung dead against the heat.

 

I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant,

Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound,

Enormous metal, shaking to the chant

Of a triphammer striking iron ground.

 

Enormous power, ugly to the fool,

And beautiful as a well-handled tool.

 

These, and the memory of that windy day

On the bare hills, beyond the last barbed wire,

When all the orange poppies bloomed one way

As if a breath would blow them into fire,

 

I keep forever, like the sea-lion’s tusk

The broken sailor brings away to land,

But when he touches it, he smells the musk,

And the whole sea lies hollow in his hand.

 

So, from a hundred visions, I make one,

And out of darkness build my mocking sun.

 

And should that task seem fruitless in the eyes

Of those a different magic sets apart

To see through the ice-crystal of the wise

No nation but the nation that is Art,

 

Their words are just. But when the birchbark-call

Is shaken with the sound that hunters make

The moose comes plunging through the forest-wall

Although the rifle waits beside the lake.

 

Art has no nations—but the mortal sky

Lingers like gold in immortality.

 

This flesh was seeded from no foreign grain

But Pennsylvania and Kentucky wheat,

And it has soaked in California rain

And five years tempered in New England sleet

 

To strive at last, against an alien proof

And by the changes of an alien moon,

To build again that blue, American roof

Over a half-forgotten battle-tune

 

And call unsurely, from a haunted ground,

Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound.

 

In your Long House there is an attic-place

Full of dead epics and machines that rust,

And there, occasionally, with casual face,

You come awhile to stir the sleepy dust;

 

Neither in pride nor mercy, but in vast

Indifference at so many gifts unsought,

The yellowed satins, smelling of the past,

And all the loot the lucky pirates brought.

 

I only bring a cup of silver air,

Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.

 

Receive the dream too haughty for the breast,

Receive the words that should have walked as bold

As the storm walks along the mountain-crest

And are like beggars whining in the cold.

 

The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill,

The patchwork colors, fading from the first,

And all the fire that fretted at the will

With such a barren ecstasy of thirst.

 

Receive them all—and should you choose to touch them

With one slant ray of quick, American light,

Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,

Even the worst will glitter in the night.

 

If not—the dry bones littered by the way

May still point giants toward their golden prey.

He closed the Bible carefully, putting it down

As if his fingers loved it.

                            Then he turned.

“Mr. Mate.”

                  “Yes, sir.”

                              The captain’s eyes held a shadow.

“I think, while this weather lasts,” he said, after a pause,

“We’d better get them on deck as much as we can.

They keep better that way. Besides,” he added, unsmiling,

“She’s begun to stink already. You’ve noticed it?”

 

The mate nodded, a boyish nod of half-apology,

“And only a week out, too, sir.”

                                    “Yes,” said the skipper.

His eyes looked into themselves. “Well. The trade,” he said,

“The trade’s no damn perfume-shop.” He drummed with his fingers.

“Seem to be quiet tonight,” he murmured, at last.

“Oh yes sir, quiet enough.” The mate flushed. “Not

What you’d call quiet at home but—quiet enough.”

 

“Um,” said the skipper. “What about the big fellow?”

 

“Tarbarrel, sir? The man who says he’s a king?

He was praying to something—it made the others restless.

Mr. Olsen stopped it.”

                          “I don’t like that,” said the skipper.

 

“It was only an idol, sir.”

                            “Oh.”

                                        “A stone or something.”

“Oh.”

          “But he’s a bad one, sir—a regular sullen one—

He—eyes in the dark—like a cat’s—enough to give you—”

The mate was young. He shivered. “The creeps,” he said.

 

“We’ve had that kind,” said the skipper. His mouth was hard

Then it relaxed. “Damn cheating Arabe!” he said,

“I told them I’d take no more of their pennyweight kings,

Worth pounds to look at, and then when you get them aboard

 

Go crazy so they have to be knocked on the head

Or else just eat up their hearts and die in a week

Taking up room for nothing.”

 

The mate hardly heard him, thinking of something else.

“I’m afraid we’ll lose some more of the women,” he said.

“Well, they’re a scratch lot,” said the skipper, “Any sickness?”

 

“Just the usual, sir.”

                        “But nothing like plague or—”

                                                        “No sir.”

“The Lord is merciful,” said the skipper.

His voice was wholly sincere—an old ship’s bell

Hung in the steeple of a meeting-house

With all New England and the sea’s noise in it.

“Well, you’d better take another look-see, Mr. Mate.”

The mate felt his lips go dry. “Aye aye, sir,” he said,

Wetting his lips with his tongue. As he left the cabin

He heard the Bible being opened again.

 

Lantern in hand, he went down to the hold.

Each time he went he had a trick of trying

To shut the pores of his body against the stench

By force of will, by thinking of salt and flowers,

But it was always useless.

                              He kept thinking:

When I get home, when I get a bath and clean food,

When I’ve gone swimming out beyond the Point

In that cold green, so cold it must be pure

Beyond the purity of a dissolved star,

When I get my shore-clothes on, and one of those shirts

Out of the linen-closet that smells of lavender,

Will my skin smell black even then, will my skin smell black?

 

The lantern shook in his hand.

                                This was black, here,

This was black to see and feel and smell and taste,

The blackness of black, with one weak lamp to light it

As ineffectually as a firefly in Hell,

And, being so, should be silent.

                                But the hold

Was never silent.

 

            There was always that breathing.

Always that thick breathing, always those shivering cries.

 

A few of the slaves

Knew English—at least the English for water and Jesus.

“I’m dying.” “Sick.” “My name Caesar.”

                                            Those who knew

These things, said these things now when they saw the lantern

Mechanically, as tamed beasts answer the whipcrack.

Their voices beat at the light like heavy moths.

But most made merely liquid or guttural sounds

Meaningless to the mate, but horribly like

The sounds of palateless men or animals trying

To talk through a human throat.

                                The mate was used

To the confusion of limbs and bodies by now.

At first it had made him think of the perturbed

Blind coil of blacksnakes thawing on a rock

In the bleak sun of Spring, or Judgment Day

Just after the first sounding of the trump

When all earth seethes and crumbles with the slow

Vast, mouldy resurrection of the dead.

But he had passed such fancies.

                                He must see

As much as he could. He couldn’t see very much.

They were too tightly packed but—no plague yet,

And all the chains were fast. Then he saw something.

The woman was asleep but her baby was dead.

He wondered whether to take it from her now.

No, it would only rouse the others. Tomorrow.

He turned away with a shiver.

                His glance fell

On the man who said he had been a king, the man

Called Tarbarrel, the image of black stone

Whose eyes were savage gods.

                                      The huge suave muscles

Rippled like stretching cats as he changed posture,

Magnificence in chains that yet was ease.

The smolder in those eyes. The steady hate.

 

The mate made himself stare till the eyes dropped.

Then he turned back to the companionway.

His forehead was hot and sweaty. He wiped it off,

But then the rough cloth of his sleeve smelt black.

 

The captain shut the Bible as he came in.

“Well, Mister Mate?”

                              “All quiet, sir.”

                                                The captain

Looked at him sharply. “Sit down,” he said in a bark.

The mate’s knees gave as he sat. “It’s—hot down there,”

He said, a little weakly, wanting to wipe

His face again, but knowing he’d smell that blackness

Again, if he did.

                  “Takes you that way, sometimes,”

Said the captain, not unkindly, “I remember

Back in the twenties.”

                      Something hot and strong

Bit the mate’s throat. He coughed.

                                    “There,” said the captain,

Putting the cup down. “You’ll feel better now.

You’re young for this trade, Mister, and that’s a fact.”

 

The mate coughed and didn’t answer, much too glad

To see the captain change back to himself

From something made of steam, to want to talk.

But, after a while, he heard the captain talking,

Half to himself.

                      “It’s a fact, that,” he was saying,

“They’ve even made a song of me—ever heard it?”

The mate shook his head, quickly, “Oh yes you have.

You know how it goes.” He cleared his throat and hummed:

 

    “Captain Ball was a Yankee slaver,

    Blow, blow, blow the man down!

    He traded in niggers and loved his Saviour,

    Give me some time to blow the man down.”

 

The droning chanty filled the narrow cabin

An instant with grey Massachusetts sea,

Wave of the North, wave of the melted ice,

The hard salt-sparkles on the harder rock.

The stony islands.

                      Then it died away.

 

“Well,” said the captain, “if that’s how it strikes them—

They mean it bad but I don’t take it bad.

I get my sailing-orders from the Lord.”

He touched the Bible. “And it’s down there, Mister,

Down there in black and white—the sons of Ham—

Bondservants—sweat of their brows.” His voice trailed off

Into texts. “I tell you, Mister,” he said fiercely,

“The pay’s good pay, but it’s the Lord’s work, too.

We’re spreading the Lord’s seed—spreading his seed—”

 

His hand made the outflung motion of a sower

And the mate, staring, seemed to hear the slight

Patter of fallen seeds on fertile ground,

Black, shining seeds, robbed from a black king’s storehouse,

Falling and falling on American earth

With light, inexorable patter and fall,

To strike, lie silent, quicken.

                          Till the Spring

Came with its weeping rains, and the ground bore

A blade, a shadow-sapling, a tree of shadow,

A black-leaved tree whose trunk and roots were shadow,

A tree shaped like a yoke, growing and growing

Until it blotted all the seamen’s stars.

 

Horses of anger trampling, horses of anger,

Trampling behind the sky in ominous cadence,

Beat of the heavy hooves like metal on metal,

Trampling something down. . . .

                                        Was it they, was it they?

Or was it cold wind in the leaves of the shadow-tree

That made such grievous music?

The dark sobbing ebbed away.

The captain was still talking. “Yes,” he said,

“And yet we treat ’em well enough. There’s no one

From Salem to the Guinea Coast can say

They lose as few as I do.” He stopped.

                                        “Well, Mister?”

The mate arose. “Good night sir and—”

                                        “Good night.”

 

The mate went up on deck. The breeze was fresh.

There were the stars, steady. He shook himself

Like a dog coming out of water and felt better.

Six weeks, with luck, and they’d be back in port

And he could draw his pay and see his girl.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t his watch, so he could sleep.

The captain still below, reading that Bible. . . .

Forget it—and the noises, still half-heard—

He’d have to go below to sleep, this time,

But after, if the weather held like this,

He’d have them sling a hammock up on deck.

You couldn’t smell the black so much on deck

And so you didn’t dream it when you slept.

Jack Ellyat had been out all day alone,

Except for his new gun and Ned, the setter,

The old wise dog with Autumn in his eyes,

Who stepped the fallen leaves so delicately

They barely rustled. Ellyat trampled them down

Crackling, like cast-off skins of fairy snakes.

He’d meant to hunt, but he had let the gun

Rest on his shoulder.

                    It was enough to feel

The cool air of the last of Indian summer

Blowing continually across his cheek

And watch the light distill its water of gold

As the sun dropped.

                    Here was October, here

Was ruddy October, the old harvester,

Wrapped like a beggared sachem in a coat

Of tattered tanager and partridge feathers,

Scattering jack-o-lanterns everywhere

To give the field-mice pumpkin-colored moons.

His red clay pipe had trailed across the land

Staining the trees with colors of the sumach:

East, West, South, North, the ceremonial fume

Blue and enchanted as the soul of air

Drifted its incense.

                    Incense of the wild,

Incense of earth fulfilled, ready to sleep

The stupefied dark slumber of the bear

All winter, underneath a frozen star.

 

Jack Ellyat felt that turning of the year

Stir in his blood like drowsy fiddle-music

And knew he was glad to be Connecticut-born

And young enough to find Connecticut winter

Was a black pond to cut with silver skates

And not a scalping-knife against the throat.

He thought the thoughts of youth, idle and proud.

So, with his back against a tree, he stared

At the pure, golden feathers in the West

Until the sunset flowed into his heart

Like a slow wave of honey-dropping dew

Murmuring from the other side of Sleep.

There was a fairy hush

Everywhere. Even the setter at his feet

Lay there as if the twilight had bewitched

His russet paws into two russet leaves,

A dog of russet leaves who did not stir a hair.

 

Then something broke the peace.

Like wind it was, the flutter of rising wind,

But then it grew until it was the rushing

Of winged stallions, distant and terrible,

Trampling beyond the sky.

                  The hissing charge

Of lightless armies of angelic horse

Galloping down the stars.

                  There were no words

In that implacable and feathery thunder,

And yet there must have been, or Ellyat’s mind

Caught them like broken arrows out of the air.

The warning beat at his mind like a bird and passed.

Ellyat roused. He thought: they are going South.

He stared at the sky, confused. It was empty and bleak.

But still he felt the shock of the hooves on his heart.

—The riderless horses never bridled or tamed—

He heard them screaming like eagles loosed from a cloud

As they drove South to trample the indolent sun,

And darkness sat in his mind like a shadow enthroned.

He could not read the riddle their flight had set

But he felt wretched, and glad for the dog’s cold nose

That now came nuzzling his hand.

                  Who has set you free?

Who has driven you out in the sky with an iron whip

Like blind, old thunders stubbornly marching abreast

To carry a portent high on shoulders of stone

The length and breadth of the Union?

The North and South are at peace and the East and West,

The tomahawk is buried in prairie-sod.

The great frontier rolls westward with the sun,

And the new States are crowding at the door,

The buckskin-States, the buffalo-horned, the wild

Mustangs with coats the color of crude gold.

Their bodies, naked as the hunter’s moon,

Smell of new grass and the sweet milk of the corn.

Defiant virgins, fiercely unpossessed

As the bird-stars that walk the night untrodden.

They drag their skies and sunsets after them

Like calico ponies on a rawhide rope,

And who would ride them must have iron thighs

And a lean heart, bright as a bowie-knife.

 

Were they not foaled with treasure in their eyes

Between the rattlesnake and the painted rock?

Are they not matches for vaquero gods?

Are they not occupation for the strength

Of a whole ruffian world of pioneers?

And must they wait like spayed mares in the rain,

While Carolina and Connecticut

Fight an old quarrel out before a ghost?

 

So Ellyat talked to his young indignation,

Walking back home with the October moon.

But, even as he mused, he tried to picture

The South, that languorous land where Uncle Toms

Groaned Biblically underneath the lash,

And grinning Topsies mopped and mowed behind

Each honeysuckle vine.

                  They called them niggers

And cut their ears off when they ran away,

But then they loved their mammies—there was that—

Although they sometimes sold them down the river—

And when the niggers were not getting licked

Or quoting Scripture, they sang funny songs,

By the Swanee river, on the old plantation.

 

The girls were always beautiful. The men

Wore varnished boots, raced horses and played cards

And drank mint-juleps till the time came round

For fighting duels with their second cousins

Or tar-and-feathering some God-damn Yankee. . . .

The South . . . the honeysuckle . . . the hot sun . . .

The taste of ripe persimmons and sugar-cane . . .

The cloyed and waxy sweetness of magnolias . . .

White cotton, blowing like a fallen cloud,

And foxhounds belling the Virginia hills . . .

 

And then the fugitive slave he’d seen in Boston,

The black man with the eyes of a tortured horse. . . .

 

He whistled Ned. What do you think of it, Ned?

We’re abolitionists, I suppose, and Father

Talks about Wendell Phillips and John Brown

But, even so, that doesn’t have to mean

We’ll break the Union up for abolition,

And they can’t want to break it up for slavery—

It won’t come to real fighting, will it, Ned?

But Ned was busy with a rabbit-track.

There was the town—the yellow window of home.

 

Meanwhile, in Concord, Emerson and Thoreau

Talked of an ideal state, so purely framed

It never could exist.

                     Meanwhile, in Boston

Minister Higginson and Dr. Howe

Waited for news about a certain project

That had to do with pikes and Harper’s Ferry.

 

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Clay Wingate dreamed.

The horses, burning-hooved, drove on toward the sea,

But, where they had passed, the air was troubled and sick

Like earth that the shoulder of earthquake heavily stirs.

There was a whisper moving that air all night,

A whisper that cried and whimpered about the house

Where John Brown prayed to his God, by his narrow bed.

They reached the Maryland bridge of Harper’s Ferry

That Sunday night. There were twenty-two in all,

Nineteen were under thirty, three not twenty-one,

Kagi, the self-taught scholar, quiet and cool,

Stevens, the cashiered soldier, Puritan-fathered,

A singing giant, gunpowder-tempered and rash.

Dauphin Thompson, the pippin-cheeked country-boy,

More like a girl than a warrior; Oliver Brown,

Married last year when he was barely nineteen;

Dangerfield Newby, colored and born a slave,

Freeman now, but married to one not free

Who, with their seven children, waited him South,

The youngest baby just beginning to crawl;

Watson Brown, the steady lieutenant, who wrote

Back to his wife,

                   “Oh, Bell, I want to see you

And the little fellow very much but must wait.

There was a slave near here whose wife was sold South.

They found him hanging in Kennedy’s orchard next morning.

I cannot come home as long as such things are done here.

I sometimes think that we shall not meet again.”

 

These were some of the band. For better or worse

They were all strong men.

                             The bearded faces look strange

In the old daguerreotypes: they should be the faces

Of prosperous, small-town people, good sons and fathers,

Good horse-shoe pitchers, good at plowing a field,

Good at swapping stories and good at praying,

American wheat, firm-rooted, good in the ear.

There is only one whose air seems out of the common,

Oliver Brown. That face has a masculine beauty

Somewhat like the face of Keats.

                                   They were all strong men.

 

They tied up the watchmen and took the rifleworks.

Then John Brown sent a raiding party away

To fetch in Colonel Washington from his farm.

The Colonel was George Washington’s great-grand-nephew,

Slave-owner, gentleman-farmer, but, more than these,

Possessor of a certain fabulous sword

Given to Washington by Frederick the Great.

They captured him and his sword and brought them along

Processionally.

               The act has a touch of drama,

Half costume-romance, half unmerited farce.

On the way, they told the Washington slaves they were free,

Or free to fight for their freedom.

                                   The slaves heard the news

With the dazed, scared eyes of cattle before a storm.

A few came back with the band and were given pikes,

And, when John Brown was watching, pretended to mount

A slipshod guard over the prisoners.

But, when he had walked away, they put down their pikes

And huddled together, talking in mourning voices.

It didn’t seem right to play at guarding the Colonel

But they were afraid of the bearded patriarch

With the Old Testament eyes.

                          A little later

It was Patrick Higgins’ turn. He was the night-watchman

Of the Maryland bridge, a tough little Irishman

With a canny, humorous face, and a twist in his speech.

He came humming his way to his job.

                                     “Halt!” ordered a voice.

He stopped a minute, perplexed. As he told men later,

“Now I didn’t know what ‘Halt!’ mint, any more

Than a hog knows about a holiday.”

                                  There was a scuffle.

He got away with a bullet-crease in his scalp

And warned the incoming train. It was half-past-one.

A moment later, a man named Shepherd Heyward,

Free negro, baggage-master of the small station,

Well-known in the town, hardworking, thrifty and fated,

Came looking for Higgins.

                          “Halt!” called the voice again,

But he kept on, not hearing or understanding,

Whichever it may have been.

                          A rifle cracked.

He fell by the station-platform, gripping his belly,

And lay for twelve hours of torment, asking for water

Until he was able to die.

                        There is no stone,

No image of bronze or marble green with the rain

To Shepherd Heyward, free negro of Harper’s Ferry,

And even the books, the careful, ponderous histories,

That turn live men into dummies with smiles of wax

Thoughtfully posed against a photographer’s background

In the act of signing a treaty or drawing a sword,

Tell little of what he was.

                          And yet his face

Grey with pain and puzzled at sudden death

Stares out at us through the bookworm-dust of the years

With an uncomprehending wonder, a blind surprise.

“I was getting along,” it says, “I was doing well.

I had six thousand dollars saved in the bank.

It was a good town, a nice town, I liked the folks

And they liked me. I had a good job there, too.

On Sundays I used to dress myself up slick enough

To pass the plate in church, but I wasn’t proud

Not even when trashy niggers called me Mister,

Though I could hear the old grannies over their snuff

Mumbling along, ‘Look, chile, there goes Shepherd Heyward.

Ain’t him fine in he Sunday clo’es—ain’t him sassy and fine?

You grow up decent and don’t play ball in the street,

And maybe you’ll get like him, with a gold watch and chain.’

And then, suddenly—and what was it all about?

Why should anyone want to kill me? Why was it done?”

 

So the grey lips. And so the hurt in the eyes.

A hurt like a child’s, at punishment unexplained

That makes the whole child-universe fall to pieces.

At the time of death, most men turn back toward the child.

 

Brown did not know at first that the first man dead

By the sword he thought of so often as Gideon’s sword

Was one of the race he had drawn that sword to free.

It had been dark on the bridge. A man had come

And had not halted when ordered. Then the shot

And the scrape of the hurt man dragging himself away.

That was all. The next man ordered to halt would halt.

His mind was too full of the burning judgments of God

To wonder who it had been. He was cool and at peace.

He dreamt of a lamb, lying down by a rushing stream.

 

So the night wore away, indecisive and strange.

The raiders stuck by the arsenal, waiting perhaps

For a great bell of jubilation to toll in the sky,

And the slaves to rush from the hills with pikes in their hands,

A host redeemed, black rescue-armies of God.

It did not happen.

                   Meanwhile, there was casual firing.

A townsman named Boerley was killed. Meanwhile, the train

Passed over the bridge to carry its wild news

Of abolition-devils sprung from the ground

A hundred and fifty, three hundred, a thousand strong

To pillage Harper’s Ferry, with fire and sword.

Meanwhile the whole countryside was springing to arms.

The alarm-bell in Charlestown clanged “Nat Turner has come.

Nat Turner has come again, all smoky from Hell,

Setting the slave to murder and massacre!”

The Jefferson Guards fell in. There were boys and men.

They had no uniforms but they had weapons.

Old squirrel-rifles, taken down from the wall,

Shot guns loaded with spikes and scraps of iron.

A boy dragged a blunderbuss as big as himself.

They started for the Ferry.

                              In a dozen

A score of other sleepy, neighboring towns

The same bell clanged, the same militia assembled.

 

The Ferry itself was roused and stirring with dawn.

And the firing began again.

                          A queer, harsh sound

In the ordinary streets of that clean, small town,

A desultory, vapid, meaningless sound.

 

God knows why John Brown lingered! Kagi, the scholar,

Who, with two others, held the rifle-works,

All morning sent him messages urging retreat.

They had the inexorable weight of common sense

Behind them, but John Brown neither replied

Nor heeded, brooding in the patriarch-calm

Of a lean, solitary pine that hangs

On the cliff’s edge, and sees the world below

A tiny pattern of toy fields and trees,

And only feels its roots gripping the rock

And the almighty wind that shakes its boughs,

Blowing from eagle-heaven to eagle-heaven.

 

Of course they were cut off. The whole attempt

Was fated from the first.

                        Just about noon

The Jefferson Guards took the Potomac Bridge

And drove away the men Brown posted there.

 

There were three doors of possible escape

Open to Brown. With this the first slammed shut.

The second followed it a little later

With the recapture of the other bridge

That cut Brown off from Kagi and the arsenal

And penned the larger body of the raiders

In the armory.

              Again the firing rolled,

And now the first of the raiders fell and died,

Dangerfield Newby, the freed Scotch-mulatto

Whose wife and seven children, slaves in Virginia,

Waited for him to bring them incredible freedom.

They were sold South instead, after the raid.

His body lay where the townspeople could reach it.

They cut off his ears for trophies.

                                If there are souls,

As many think that there are or wish that there might be,

Crystalline things that rise on light wings exulting

Out of the spoilt and broken cocoon of the body,

Knowing no sorrow or pain but only deliverance,

And yet with the flame of speech, the patterns of memory,

One wonders what the soul of Dangerfield Newby

Said, in what terms, to the soul of Shepherd Heyward,

Both born slave, both freed, both dead the same day.

What do the souls that bleed from the corpse of battle

Say to the tattered night?

                          Perhaps it is better

We have no power to visage what they might say.

 

The firing now was constant, like the heavy

And drumming rains of summer. Twice Brown sent

Asking a truce. The second time there went

Stevens and Watson Brown with a white flag.

But things had gone beyond the symbol of flags.

Stevens, shot from a window, fell in the gutter

Horribly wounded. Watson Brown crawled back

To the engine house that was the final fort

Of Brown’s last stand, torn through and through with slugs.

 

A Mr. Brua, one of Brown’s prisoners,

Strolled out from the unguarded prison-room

Into the bullets, lifted Stevens up,

Carried him over to the old hotel

They called the Wager House, got a doctor for him,

And then strolled back to take his prisoner’s place

With Colonel Washington and the scared rest.

I know no more than this of Mr. Brua

But he seems curiously American,

And I imagine him a tall, stooped man

A little yellow with the Southern sun,

With slow, brown eyes and a slow way of talking,

Shifting the quid of tobacco in his cheek

Mechanically, as he lifted up

The dirty, bloody body of the man

Who stood for everything he most detested

And slowly carrying him through casual wasps

Of death to the flyspecked but sunny room

In the old hotel, wiping the blood and grime

Mechanically from his Sunday coat,

Settling his black string-tie with big, tanned hands,

And, then, incredibly, going back to jail.

He did not think much about what he’d done

But sat himself as comfortably as might be

On the cold bricks of that dejected guard-room

And slowly started cutting another quid

With a worn knife that had a brown bone-handle.

 

He lived all through the war and died long after,

This Mr. Brua I see. His last advice

To numerous nephews was “Keep out of trouble,

But if you’re in it, chew and don’t be hasty,

Just do whatever’s likeliest at hand.”

 

I like your way of talking, Mr. Brua,

And if there still are people interested

In cutting literary clothes for heroes

They might do worse than mention your string-tie.

 

There were other killings that day. On the one side, this,

Leeman, a boy of eighteen and the youngest raider,

Trying to flee from the death-trap of the engine-house

And caught and killed on an islet in the Potomac.

The body lay on a tiny shelf of rock

For hours, a sack of clothes still stung by bullets.

 

On the other side—Fontaine Beckham, mayor of the town,

Went to look at Heyward’s body with Patrick Higgins.

The slow tears crept to his eyes. He was getting old.

He had thought a lot of Heyward. He had no gun

But he had been mayor of the town for a dozen years,

A peaceful, orderly place full of decent people,

And now they were killing people, here in his town,

He had to do something to stop it, somehow or other.

He wandered out on the railroad, half-distraught

And peeped from behind a water-tank at the raiders.

“Squire, don’t go any farther,” said Higgins, “It ain’t safe.”

He hardly heard him, he had to look out again.

Who were these devils with horns who were shooting his people?

They didn’t look like devils. One was a boy

Smooth-cheeked, with a bright half-dreamy face, a little

Like Sally’s eldest.

                    Suddenly, the air struck him

A stiff, breath-taking blow. “Oh,” he said, astonished.

Took a step and fell on his face, shot through the heart.

Higgins watched him for twenty minutes, wanting to lift him

But not quite daring. Then he turned away

And went back to the town.

                        The bars had been open all day,

Never to better business.

When the news of Beckham’s death spread from bar to bar,

It was like putting loco-weed in the whiskey,

The mob came together at once, the American mob,

They mightn’t be able to take Brown’s last little fort

But there were two prisoners penned in the Wager House.

One was hurt already, Stevens, no fun killing him.

But the other was William Thompson, whole and unwounded,

Caught when Brown tried to send his first flag of truce.

 

They stormed the hotel and dragged him out to the bridge,

Where two men shot him, unarmed, then threw the body

Over the trestle. It splashed in the shallow water,

But the slayers kept on firing at the dead face.

The carcass was there for days, a riven target,

Barbarously misused.

                    Meanwhile the armory yard

Was taken by a new band of Beckham’s avengers,

The most of Brown’s prisoners freed and his last escape cut off.

 

What need to tell of the killing of Kagi the scholar,

The wounding of Oliver Brown and the other deaths?

Only this remains to be told. When the drunken day

Reeled into night, there were left in the engine-house

Five men, alive and unwounded, of all the raiders.

Watson and Oliver Brown

Both of them hurt to the death, were stretched on the floor

Beside the corpse of Taylor, the young Canadian.

There was no light, there. It was bitterly cold.

A cold chain of lightless hours that slowly fell

In leaden beads between two fingers of stone.

Outside, the fools and the drunkards yelled in the streets,

And, now and then, there were shots. The prisoners talked

And tried to sleep.

                    John Brown did not try to sleep,

The live coals of his eyes severed the darkness;

Now and then he heard his young son Oliver calling

In the thirsty agony of his wounds, “Oh, kill me!

Kill me and put me out of this suffering!”

John Brown’s jaw tightened. “If you must die,” he said,

“Die like a man.” Toward morning the crying ceased.

John Brown called out to the boy but he did not answer.

“I guess he’s dead,” said John Brown.

                                      If his soul wept

They were the incredible tears of the squeezed stone.

He had not slept for two days, but he would not sleep.

The night was a chained, black leopard that he stared down,

Erect, on his feet. One wonders what sights he saw

In the cloudy mirror of his most cloudy heart,

Perhaps God clothed in a glory, perhaps himself

The little boy who had stolen three brass pins

And been well whipped for it.

                              When he was six years old

An Indian boy had given him a great wonder,

A yellow marble, the first he had ever seen.

He treasured it for months but lost it at last,

Boylike. The hurt of the loss took years to heal.

He never quite forgot.

                      He could see it now,

Smooth, hard and lovely, a yellow, glistening ball,

But it kept rolling away through cracks of darkness

Whenever he tried to catch it and hold it fast.

If he could only touch it, he would be safe,

But it trickled away and away, just out of reach,

There by the wall . . .

                        Outside the blackened East

Began to tarnish with a faint, grey stain

That caught on the fixed bayonets of the marines.

Lee of Virginia, Light Horse Harry’s son,

Observed it broaden, thinking of many things,

But chiefly wanting to get his business done,

A curious, wry, distasteful piece of work

For regular soldiers.

                      Therefore to be finished

As swiftly and summarily as possible

Before this yelling mob of drunk civilians

And green militia once got out of hand.

His mouth set. Once already he had offered

The honor of the attack to the militia,

Such honor as it was.

                      Their Colonel had

Declined with a bright nervousness of haste.

“Your men are paid for doing this kind of work.

Mine have their wives and children.” Lee smiled briefly,

Remembering that. The smile had a sharp edge.

Well, it was time.

                    The whooping crowd fell silent

And scattered, as a single man walked out

Toward the engine-house, a letter in his hand.

Lee watched him musingly. A good man, Stuart.

Now he was by the door and calling out.

The door opened a crack.

                        Brown’s eyes were there

Over the cold muzzle of a cocked carbine.

The parleying began, went on and on,

While the crowd shivered and Lee watched it all

With the strict commonsense of a Greek sword

And with the same sure readiness.

                                  Unperceived,

The dawn ran down the valleys of the wind,

Coral-footed dove, tracking the sky with coral . . .

Then, sudden as powder flashing in a pan,

The parleying was done.

                          The door slammed shut.

The little figure of Stuart jumped aside

Waving its cap.

              And the marines came on.

 

Brown watched them come. One hand was on his carbine.

The other felt the pulse of his dying son.

“Sell your lives dear,” he said. The rifle-shots

Rattled within the bricked-in engine-room

Like firecrackers set off in a stone jug,

And there was a harsh stink of sweat and powder.

There was a moment when the door held firm.

Then it was cracked with sun.

                            Brown fired and missed.

A shadow with a sword leaped through the sun.

“That’s Ossawattomie,” said the tired voice

Of Colonel Washington.

                        The shadow lunged

And Brown fell to his knees.

                            The sword bent double,

A light sword, better for parades than fighting,

The shadow had to take it in both hands

And fairly rain his blows with it on Brown

Before he sank.

                Now two marines were down,

The rest rushed in over their comrades’ bodies,

Pinning one man of Brown’s against the wall

With bayonets, another to the floor.

 

Lee, on his rise of ground, shut up his watch.

It had been just a quarter of an hour

Since Stuart gave the signal for the storm,

And now it was over.

                    All but the long dying.

There was no real moon in all the soft, clouded night,

The rats of night had eaten the silver cheese,

Though here and there a forgotten crumb of old brightness

Gleamed and was blotted.

                        But there was no real moon,

No bowl of nacre, dripping an old delusive

Stain on the changed, strange grass, making faces strange;

There was only a taste of warm rain not yet fallen,

A wine-colored dress, turned black because of no moon,

—It would have been spangled in moon—and a broadcloth coat,

And two voices talking together, quite softly, quite calmly.

The dance. Such a lovely dance. But you dance so lightly.

Amanda dances so well. But you dance so lightly.

Louisa looks so pretty in pink, don’t you think?

Are you fond of Scott? Yes, I’m very fond of Scott.

Elegant extracts from gilt-edged volumes called Keepsakes

And Godey’s Lady’s Book words.

                                If I were a girl,

A girl in a Godey’s Lady’s Book steel-engraving,

I would have no body or legs, no aches or delusions.

I would know what to do. I would marry a man called Mister.

We would live in a steel-engraving, in various costumes

Designed in the more respectable Paris modes,

With two little boys in little plush hats like muffins,

And two little girls with pantalettes to their chins.

I must do that, I think.

                    But now my light feet know

That they will be tired and burning with all my dancing

Before I cool them in the exquisite coolness

Of water or the cool virginal sheets of virgins,

And a face comes swimming toward me out of black broadcloth

And my heart knocks.

                    Who are you, why are you here?

Why should you trouble my eyes?

                              No, Mr. Wingate,

I cannot agree with you on the beauties of Byron.

But why should something melt in the stuff of my hand,

And my voice sound thin in my ears?

                                  This face is a face

Like any other face. Did my mother once

Hear thin blood sing in her ears at a voice called Mister?

And wish for—and not wish for—and when the strange thing

Was consummate, then, and she lay in a coil of darkness,

Did she feel so much changed? What is it to be

A woman?

          No, I must live in a steel-engraving.

 

His voice said. But there was other than his voice.

Something that heard warm rain on unopened flowers

And spoke or tried to speak across swimming blackness

To the slight profile and the wine-colored dress.

Her hair was black. Her eyes might be black or grey.

He could not remember, it irked him not to remember.

But she was just Sally Dupré from Appleton

Only she was not. Only she was a shadow

And a white face—a terrible, white shut face

That looked through windows of inflexible glass

Disdainfully upon the beauties of Byron

And every puppy that ever howled for the moon

To brush warm raindrops across the unopened flower

And so quiet the heart with—what?

                                But you speak to her aunts.

You are Wingate of Wingate Hall. You are not caught

Like a bee drunk with the smell of honey, the smell of sleep,

In a slight flower of glass whose every petal

Shows eyes one cannot remember as black or grey.

You converse easily on elegant subjects

Suitable for young ladies.

                        You do not feel

The inexorable stairs of the flesh ascended

By an armed enemy with a naked torch.

This has been felt before, this has been quenched

With fitting casualness in flesh that has

A secret stain of the sun.

                        It is not a subject

Suitable for the converse of young ladies.

 

“My God, My God, why will she not answer the aching?

My God, My God, to lie at her side through the darkness!”

 

And yet—is it real—do I really—

                                  The wine-colored dress

Rose, Broadcloth rose and took her back to the dance.

On Saturday, in Southern market towns,

When I was a boy with twenty cents to spend,

The carts began to drift in with the morning,

And, by the afternoon, the slipshod Square

And all broad Center Street were lined with them;

Moth-eaten mules that whickered at each other

Between the mended shafts of rattletrap wagons,

Mud-spattered buggies, mouldy phaetons,

And, here and there, an ox-cart from the hills

Whose solemn team had shoulders of rough, white rock,

Innocent noses, black and wet as snailshells,

And that inordinate patience in their eyes.

 

There always was a Courthouse in the Square,

A cupolaed Courthouse, drowsing Time away

Behind the grey-white pillars of its porch

Like an old sleepy judge in a spotted gown;

And, down the Square, always a languid jail

Of worn, uneven brick with moss in the cracks

Or stone weathered the grey of weathered pine.

The plump jail-master wore a linen duster

In summer, and you used to see him sit

Tilted against the wall in a pine-chair,

Spitting reflectively in the warm dust

While endless afternoons slowly dissolved

Into the longer shadow, the dust-blue twilight.

Higgledy-piggledy days—days that are gone—

The trotters are dead, all the yellow-painted sulkies

Broken for firewood—the old Courthouse grins

Through new false-teeth of Alabama limestone—

The haircloth lap-robe weeps on a Ford radiator—

 

But I have seen the old Courthouse. I have seen

The flyspecked windows and the faded flag

Over the judge’s chair, touched the scuffed walls,

Spat in the monumental brass spittoons

And smelt the smell that never could be aired,

Although one opened windows for a year,

The unforgettable, intangible

Mixture of cheap cigars, worm-eaten books,

Sweat, poverty, negro hair-oil, grief and law.

I have seen the long room packed with quiet men,

Fit to turn mob, if need were, in a flash—

Cocked-pistol men, so lazily attentive

Their easy languor knocked against your ribs

As, hour by hour, the lawyers droned along,

And minute on creeping minute, your cold necknape

Waited the bursting of the firecracker,

The flare of fury.

                And yet, that composed fury

Burnt itself out, unflaring—was held down

By a dry, droning voice, a faded flag.

The kettle never boiled, the pistol stayed

At cock but the snake-head hammer never fell. . . .

The little boys climbed down beyond the windows. . . .

 

So, in the cupolaed Courthouse there in Charlestown,

When the jail-guards had carried in the cot

Where Brown lay like a hawk with a broken back,

I hear the rustle of the moving crowd,

The buzz outside, taste the dull, heavy air,

Smell the stale smell and see the country carts

Hitched in the streets.

                      For a long, dragging week

Of market-Saturdays the trial went on.

The droning voices rise and fall and rise.

Stevens lies quiet on his mattress, breathing

The harsh and difficult breath of a dying man,

Although not dying then.

                       Beyond the Square

The trees are dry, but all the dry leaves not fallen—

Yellow leaves falling through a grey-blue dusk,

The first winds of November whirl and scatter them. . . .

 

Read as you will in any of the books,

The details of the thing, the questions and answers,

How sometimes Brown would walk, sometimes was carried,

At first would hardly plead, half-refused counsel,

Accepted later, made up witness-lists,

Grew fitfully absorbed in his defense,

Only to flare in temper at his first lawyers

And drive them from the case.

                            Questions and answers,

Wheels creaking in a void.

                         Sometimes he lay

Quiet upon his cot, the hawk-eyes staring.

Sometimes his fingers moved mechanically

As if at their old task of sorting wool,

Fingertips that could tell him in the dark

Whether the wool they touched was from Ohio

Or from Vermont. They had the shepherd’s gift.

It was his one sure talent.

                         Questions creaking

Uselessly back and forth.

                         No one can say

That the trial was not fair. The trial was fair,

Painfully fair by every rule of law,

And that it was made not the slightest difference.

The law’s our yardstick, and it measures well

Or well enough when there are yards to measure.

Measure a wave with it, measure a fire,

Cut sorrow up in inches, weigh content.

You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough,

But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?

 

He had the shepherd’s gift, but that was all.

He had no other single gift for life.

Some men are pasture Death turns back to pasture,

Some are fire-opals on that iron wrist,

Some the deep roots of wisdoms not yet born.

John Brown was none of these,

He was a stone,

A stone eroded to a cutting edge

By obstinacy, failure and cold prayers.

Discredited farmer, dubiously involved

In lawsuit after lawsuit, Shubel Morgan

Fantastic bandit of the Kansas border,

Red-handed murderer at Pottawattomie,

Cloudy apostle, whooped along to death

By those who do no violence themselves

But only buy the guns to have it done,

Sincere of course, as all fanatics are,

And with a certain minor-prophet air,

That fooled the world to thinking him half-great

When all he did consistently was fail.

So far one advocate.

                  But there is this.

 

Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself.

Sometimes the earth is torn by something blind.

Sometimes an image that has stood so long

It seems implanted as the polar star

Is moved against an unfathomed force

That suddenly will not have it any more.

Call it the mores, call it God or Fate,

Call it Mansoul or economic law,

That force exists and moves.

                          And when it moves

It will employ a hard and actual stone

To batter into bits an actual wall

And change the actual scheme of things.

                                    John Brown

Was such a stone—unreasoning as the stone,

Destructive as the stone, and, if you like,

Heroic and devoted as such a stone.

He had no gift for life, no gift to bring

Life but his body and a cutting edge,

But he knew how to die.

                      And yardstick law

Gave him six weeks to burn that hoarded knowledge

In one swift fire whose sparks fell like live coals

On every State in the Union.

                           Listen now,

Listen, the bearded lips are speaking now,

There are no more guerilla-raids to plan,

There are no more hard questions to be solved

Of right and wrong, no need to beg for peace,

Here is the peace unbegged, here is the end,

Here is the insolence of the sun cast off,

Here is the voice already fixed with night.

The voice ceased. There was a deep, brief pause.

The judge pronounced the formal words of death.

One man, a stranger, tried to clap his hands.

The foolish sound was stopped.

There was nothing but silence then.

                                No cries in the court,

No roar, no slightest murmur from the thronged street,

As Brown went back to jail between his guards.

The heavy door shut behind them.

There was a noise of chairs scraped back in the court-room,

And that huge sigh of a crowd turning back into men.

A month between the sentence and the hanging.

A month of endless visitors, endless letters.

A Mrs. Russell came to clean his coat.

A sculptor sketched him.

                    In the anxious North,

The anxious Dr. Howe most anxiously

Denied all godly connection with the raid,

And Gerrit Smith conveniently went mad

For long enough to sponge his mind of all

Memory of such an unsuccessful deed.

Only the tough, swart-minded Higginson

Kept a grim decency, would not deny.

Pity the portly men, pity the pious,

Pity the fool who lights the powder-mine,

They need your counterfeit penny, they will live long.

 

In Charlestown meanwhile, there were whispers of rescue.

Brown told them,

“I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live.”

And lived his month so, busily.

A month of trifles building up a legend

And letters in a pinched, firm handwriting

Courageous, scriptural, misspelt and terse,

Sowing a fable everywhere they fell

While the town filled with troops.

                              The Governor came,

Enemies, friends, militia-cavaliers,

Old Border Foes.

                The month ebbed into days,

The wife and husband met for the last time,

The last letter was written:

At last the clear warm day, so slow to come.

 

The North that had already now begun

To mold his body into crucified Christ’s,

Hung fables about those hours—saw him move

Symbolically, kiss a negro child,

Do this and that, say things he never said,

To swell the sparse, hard outlines of the event

With sentimental omen.

                       It was not so.

He stood on the jail-porch in carpet-slippers,

Clad in a loose ill-fitting suit of black,

Tired farmer waiting for his team to come.

He left one last written message:

They did not hang him in the jail or the Square.

The two white horses dragged the rattling cart

Out of the town. Brown sat upon his coffin.

Beyond the soldiers lay the open fields

Earth-colored, sleepy with unfallen frost.

The farmer’s eye took in the bountiful land.

“This is a beautiful country,” said John Brown.

 

The gallows-stairs were climbed, the death-cap fitted.

Behind the gallows,

Before a line of red-and-grey cadets,

A certain odd Professor T. J. Jackson

Watched disapprovingly the ragged militia

Deploy for twelve long minutes ere they reached

Their destined places.

The Presbyterian sabre of his soul

Was moved by a fey breath.

                          He saw John Brown,

A tiny blackened scrap of paper-soul

Fluttering above the Pit that Calvin barred

With bolts of iron on the unelect;

He heard the just, implacable Voice speak out

“Depart ye wicked to eternal fire.”

And sternly prayed that God might yet be moved

To save the predestined cinder from the flame.

 

Brown did not hear the prayer. The rough black cloth

Of the death-cap hid his eyes now. He had seen

The Blue Ridge Mountains couched in their blue haze.

Perhaps he saw them still, behind his eyes—

Perhaps just cloth, perhaps nothing any more.

“I shall look unto the hills from whence cometh my help.”

 

The hatchet cut the cord. The greased trap fell.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

He will not come again with foolish pikes

And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.

He has gone back North. The slaves have forgotten his eyes.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

Already the corpse is changed, under the stone,

The strong flesh rotten, the bones dropping away.

Cotton will grow next year, in spite of the skull.

Slaves will be slaves next year, in spite of the bones.

Nothing is changed, John Brown, nothing is changed.

 

“There is a song in my bones. There is a song

In my white bones.”

 

I hear no song. I hear

Only the blunt seeds growing secretly

In the dark entrails of the preparate earth,

The rustle of the cricket under the leaf,

The creaking of the cold wheel of the stars.

 

“Bind my white bones together—hollow them

To skeleton pipes of music. When the wind

Blows from the budded Spring, the song will blow.”

 

I hear no song. I only hear the roar

Of the Spring freshets, and the gushing voice

Of mountain-brooks that overflow their banks,

Swollen with melting ice and crumbled earth.

 

“That is my song.

It is made of water and wind. It marches on.”

 

No, John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering,

A-mouldering.

 

“My bones have been washed clean

And God blows through them with a hollow sound,

And God has shut his wildfire in my dead heart.”

 

I hear it now,

Faint, faint as the first droning flies of March,

Faint as the multitudinous, tiny sigh

Of grasses underneath a windy scythe.

 

“It will grow stronger.”

 

It has grown stronger. It is marching on.

It is a throbbing pulse, a pouring surf,

It is the rainy gong of the Spring sky

Echoing,

John Brown’s body,

John Brown’s body.

But still it is not fierce. I find it still

More sorrowful than fierce.

 

“You have not heard it yet. You have not heard

The ghosts that walk in it, the shaking sound.”

 

Strong medicine,

Bitter medicine of the dead,

I drink you now. I hear the unloosed thing,

The anger of the ripe wheat—the ripened earth

Sullenly quaking like a beaten drum

From Kansas to Vermont. I hear the stamp

Of the ghost-feet. I hear the ascending sea.

What is this agony of the marching dust?

What are these years ground into hatchet blades?

 

“Ask the tide why it rises with the moon,

My bones and I have risen like that tide

And an immortal anguish plucks us up

And will not hide us till our song is done.”

 

The phantom drum diminishes—the year

Rolls back. It is only winter still, not spring,

The snow still flings its white on the new grave,

Nothing is changed, John Brown, nothing is changed

John . . . Brown . . .

The stone falls in the pool, the ripples spread.

The colt in the Long Meadow kicked up his heels.

“That was a fly,” he thought, “It’s early for flies.”

But being alive, in April, was too fine

For flies or anything else to bother a colt.

He kicked up his heels again, this time in pure joy,

And started to run a race with the wind and his shadow.

After the stable stuffiness, the sun.

After the straw-littered boards, the squelch of the turf.

His little hoofs felt lighter than dancing-shoes,

He scared himself with a blue-jay, his heart was a leaf.

He was pure joy in action, he was the unvexed

Delight of all moving lightness and swift-footed pace,

The pride of the flesh, the young Spring neighing and rearing.

Sally Dupré called to him from the fence.

He came like a charge in a spatter of clean-cut clods,

Ears back, eyes wide and wild with folly and youth.

He drew up snorting.

                    She laughed and brushed at her skirt

Where the mud had splashed it.

                            “There, Star—there, silly boy!

Why won’t you ever learn sense?”

                            But her eyes were hot,

Her hands were shaking as she offered the sugar

—Long-fingered, appleblossom-shadow hands—

Star blew at the sugar once, then mumbled it up.

She patted the pink nose. “There, silly Star!

That’s for Fort Sumter, Star!” How hot her eyes were!

“Star, do you know you’re a Confederate horse?

Do you know I’m going to call you Beauregard?”

 

Star whinnied, and asked for more sugar. She put her hand

On his neck for a moment that matched the new green leaves

And sticky buds of April.

                            You would have said

They were grace in quietness, seen so, woman and horse. . . .

 

The widened ripple breaks against a stone

The heavy noon walks over Chancellorsville

On brazen shoes, but where the squadron rode

Into the ambush, the blue flies are coming

To blow on the dead meat.

 

Carter, the telegraph-operator, sighed

And propped his eyes awake again.

                                He was tired.

Dog-tired, stone-tired, body and mind burnt up

With too much poker last night and too little sleep.

He hated the Sunday trick. It was Riley’s turn

To take it, but Riley’s wife was having a child.

He cursed the child and the wife and Sunday and Riley.

Nothing ever happened at Stroudsburg Siding

And yet he had to be here and keep awake

With the flat, stale taste of too little sleep in his mouth

And wait for nothing to happen.

                               His bulky body

Lusted for sleep with every muscle and nerve.

He’d rather have sleep than a woman or whiskey or money.

He’d give up the next three women that might occur

For ten minutes’ sleep, he’d never play poker again,

He’d—battered face beginning to droop on his hands—

Sleep—women—whiskey—eyelids too heavy to lift—

“Yes, Ma, I said, ‘Now I lay me.’ ”—

                                    The sounder chattered

And his head snapped back with a sharp, neck-breaking jerk.

By God, he’d nearly—chat—chitter—chatter—chat—chat—

For a moment he took it in without understanding

And then the vein in his forehead began to swell

And his eyes bulged wide awake.

                              “By Jesus!” he said,

And stared at the sounder as if it had turned to a snake.

“By Jesus!” he said, “By Jesus, they’ve done it!” he said.

 

The cruelty of cold trumpets wounds the air.

The ponderous princes draw their gauntlets on.

The captains fit their coal-black armor on.

 

Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew,

Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,

Able, well-hated, face alive with life,

Looked round the council-chamber with the slight

Perpetual smile he held before himself

Continually like a silk-ribbed fan.

Behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind

Weighed Gentiles in an old balance.

                                  There they were.

Toombs, the tall, laughing, restless Georgian,

As fine to look at as a yearling bull,

As hard to manage.

                 Stephens, sickly and pale,

Sweet-voiced, weak-bodied, ailingly austere,

The mind’s thin steel wearing the body out,

The racked intelligence, the crippled charm.

Mallory—Reagan—Walker—at the head

Davis.

     The mind behind the silk-ribbed fan

Was a dark prince, clothed in an Eastern stuff,

Whose brown hands cupped about a crystal egg

That filmed with colored cloud. The eyes stared, searching.

 

“I am the Jew. What am I doing here?

The Jew is in my blood and in my hands,

The lonely, bitter and quicksilver drop,

The stain of myrrh that dyes no Gentile mind

With tinctures out of the East and the sad blare

Of the curled ramshorn on Atonement Day.

A river runs between these men and me,

A river of blood and time and liquid gold,

—Oh white rivers of Canaan, running the night!—

And we are colleagues. And we speak to each other

Across the roar of that river, but no more.

I hide myself behind a smiling fan.

They hide themselves behind a Gentile mask

And, if they fall, they will be lifted up,

Being the people, but if I once fall

I fall forever, like the rejected stone.

That is the Jew of it, my Gentile friends,

To see too far ahead and yet go on

And I can smile at it behind my fan

With a drowned mirth that you would find uncouth.

For here we are, the makeshift Cabinet

Of a new nation, gravely setting down

Rules, precedents and cautions, never once

Admitting aloud the cold, plain Franklin sense

That if we do not hang together now

We shall undoubtedly hang separately.

It is the Jew, to see too far ahead—

 

I wonder what they’re doing in the North,

And how their Cabinet shapes, and how they take

Their railsplitter, and if they waste their time

As we waste ours and Mr. Davis’s.

 

Jefferson Davis, pride of Mississippi,

First President of the Confederate States,

What are you thinking now?

                              Your eyes look tired.

Your face looks more and more like John Calhoun.

And that is just, because you are his son

In everything but blood, the austere child

Of his ideas, the flower of states-rights.

I will not gird against you, Jefferson Davis.

I sent you a challenge once, but that’s forgotten,

And though your blood runs differently from mine,

The Jew salutes you from behind his fan,

Because you are the South he fell in love with

When that young black-haired girl with the Gentile-eyes,

Proud, and a Catholic, and with honey-lips,

First dinted her French heels upon his heart. . . .

We have changed since, but the remembered Spring

Can change no more, even in the Autumn smokes.

We cannot help that havoc of the heart

But my changed mind remembers half the spring

And shall till winter falls.

                            No, Jefferson Davis,

You are not she—you are not the warm night

On the bayou, or the New Orleans lamps,

The white-wine bubbles in the crystal cup,

The almond blossoms, sleepy with the sun:

But, nevertheless, you are the South in word,

Deed, thought and temper, the cut cameo

Brittle but durable, refined but fine,

The hands well-shaped, not subtle, but not weak,

The mind set in tradition but not unjust,

The generous slaveholder, the gentleman

Who neither forces his gentility

Nor lets it be held lightly—

                              and yet, and yet

I think you look too much like John Calhoun,

I think your temper is too brittly-poised,

I think your hands too scholar-sensitive,

And though they say you mingle in your voice

The trumpet and the harp, I think it lacks

That gift of warming men which coarser voices

Draw from the common dirt you tread upon

But do not take in your hands. I think you are

All things except success, all honesty

Except the ultimate honesty of the earth,

All talents but the genius of the sun.

And yet I would not have you otherwise,

Although I see too clearly what you are.

 

Except—except—oh honeydropping Spring,

Oh black-haired woman with the Gentile eyes!

Tell me, you Gentiles, when your Gentile wives

Pray in the church for you and for the South,

How do they pray?—not in that lulling voice

Where some drowned bell of France makes undertones

To the warm river washing the levee.

You do not have so good a prayer as mine.

You cannot have so good a prayer as mine.”

Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,

The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,

Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,

Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,

Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field—

Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down

The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers,

And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay

As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine

Plutarchan sentences carved in a Latin bronze;

The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon,

The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician,

State-character but comparative failure at forty

In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars,

Honesty rare as a man without self-pity,

Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind,

And a self-confidence like an iron bar:

This Lincoln, President now by the grace of luck,

Disunion, politics, Douglas and a few speeches

Which make the monumental booming of Webster

Sound empty as the belly of a burst drum,

Lincoln shambled in to the Cabinet meeting

And sat, ungainly and awkward. Seated so

He did not seem so tall nor quite so strange

Though he was strange enough. His new broadcloth suit

Felt tight and formal across his big shoulders still

And his new shiny top-hat was not yet battered

To the bulging shape of the old familiar hat

He’d worn at Springfield, stuffed with its hoard of papers.

He was pretty tired. All week the office-seekers

Had plagued him as the flies in fly-time plague

A gaunt-headed, patient horse. The children weren’t well

And Mollie was worried about them so sharp with her tongue.

But he knew Mollie and tried to let it go by.

Men tracked dirt in the house and women liked carpets.

Each had a piece of the right, that was all most people could stand.

 

Look at his Cabinet here. There were Seward and Chase,

Both of them good men, couldn’t afford to lose them,

But Chase hates Seward like poison and Seward hates Chase

And both of ’em think they ought to be President

Instead of me. When Seward wrote me that letter

The other day, he practically told me so.

I suppose a man who was touchy about his pride

Would send them both to the dickens when he found out,

But I can’t do that as long as they do their work.

The Union’s too big a horse to keep changing the saddle

Each time it pinches you. As long as you’re sure

The saddle fits, you’re bound to put up with the pinches

And not keep fussing the horse.

                                  When I was a boy

I remember figuring out when I went to town

That if I had just one pumpkin to bump in a sack

It was hard to carry, but once you could get two pumpkins,

One in each end of the sack, it balanced things up.

Seward and Chase’ll do for my pair of pumpkins.

And as for me—if anyone else comes by

Who shows me that he can manage this job of mine

Better than I can—well, he can have the job.

It’s harder sweating than driving six cross mules,

But I haven’t run into that other fellow yet

And till or supposing I meet him, the job’s my job

And nobody else’s.

                Seward and Chase don’t know that.

They’ll learn it, in time.

                           Wonder how Jefferson Davis

Feels, down there in Montgomery, about Sumter.

He must be thinking pretty hard and fast,

For he’s an able man, no doubt of that.

We were born less than forty miles apart,

Less than a year apart—he got the start

Of me in age, and raising too, I guess,

In fact, from all you hear about the man,

If you set out to pick one of us two

For President, by birth and folks and schooling,

General raising, training up in office,

I guess you’d pick him, nine times out of ten

And yet, somehow, I’ve got to last him out.

 

These thoughts passed through the mind in a moment’s flash.

Then that mind turned to business.

                                  It was the calling

Of seventy-five thousand volunteers.

Shake out the long line of verse like a lanyard of woven steel

And let us praise while we can what things no praise can deface,

The corn that hurried so fast to be ground in an iron wheel

The obdurate, bloody dream that slept before it grew base.

 

Not the silk flag and the shouts, the catchword patrioteers,

The screaming noise of the press, the preachers who howled for blood,

But a certain and stubborn pith in the hearts of the cannoneers

Who hardly knew their guns before they died in the mud.

 

They came like a run of salmon where the ice-fed Kennebec flings

Its death at the arrow-silver of the packed and mounting host,

They came like the young deer trooping to the ford by Eutaw Springs,

Their new horns fuzzy with velvet, their coats still rough with the frost.

 

North and South they assembled, one cry and the other cry,

And both are ghosts to us now, old drums hung up on a wall,

But they were the first hot wave of youth too-ready to die,

And they went to war with an air, as if they went to a ball.

 

Dress-uniform boys who rubbed their buttons brighter than gold,

And gave them to girls for flowers and raspberry-lemonade,

Unused to the sick fatigue, the route-march made in the cold,

The stink of the fever camps, the tarnish rotting the blade.

 

We in our time have seen that impulse going to war

And how that impulse is dealt with. We have seen the circle complete.

The ripe wheat wasted like trash between the fool and the whore.

We cannot praise again that anger of the ripe wheat.

 

This we have seen as well, distorted and half-forgotten

In what came before and after, where the blind went leading the blind,

The first swift rising of youth before the symbols were rotten,

The price too much to pay, the payment haughty in kind.

 

So with these men and then. They were much like the men you know,

Under the beards and the strangeness of clothes with a different fit.

They wrote mush-notes to their girls and wondered how it would go,

Half-scared, half-fierce at the thought, but none yet ready to quit.

 

Georgia, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Maine,

Piney-woods squirrel-hunter and clerk with the brand-new gun,

Thus they were marshalled and drilled, while Spring turned Summer again,

Until they could stumble toward death at gartersnake-crooked Bull Run.

Wingate sat in his room at night

Between the moon and the candle-light,

Reading his Byron with knitted brows,

While his mind drank in the peace of his house,

It was long past twelve, and the night was deep

With moonlight and silence and wind and sleep,

And the small, dim noises, thousand-fold,

That all old houses and forests hold.

The boards that creak for nothing at all,

The leaf that rustles, the bough that sighs,

The nibble of mice in the wainscot-wall,

And the slow clock ticking the time that dies

All distilled in a single sound

Like a giant breathing underground,

A sound more sleepy than sleep itself.

Wingate put his book on the shelf

And went to the window. It was good

To walk in the ghost through a silver wood

And set one’s mettle against the far

Bayonet-point of the fixed North Star.

He stood there a moment, wondering.

North Star, wasp with the silver sting

Blue-nosed star on the Yankee banners,

We are coming against you to teach you manners!

With crumbs of thunder and wreaths of myrtle

And cannon that dance to a Dixie chorus,

With a song that bites like a snapping-turtle

And the tiger-lily of Summer before us,

To pull you down like a torn bandanna,

And drown you deeper than the Savannah!

 

And still, while his arrogance made its cry,

He shivered a little, wondering why.

 

There was his uniform, grey as ash,

The boots that shone like a well-rubbed table,

The tassels of silk on the colored sash

And sleek Black Whistle down in the stable.

The housewife, stitched from a beauty’s fan,

The pocket-Bible with Mother’s writing,

The sabre never yet fleshed in man,

And all the crisp new toys of fighting.

He gloated at them with a boyish pride,

But still he wondered, Monmouth-eyed.

The Black Horse Troop was a cavalier

And gallant name for a lady’s ear.

He liked the sound and the ringing brag

And the girls who stitched on the county flag,

The smell of horses and saddle-leather

And the feel of the squadron riding together,

From the loose-reined canter of colts at large,

To the crammed, tense second before the charge:

He liked it all with the young, keen zest

Of a hound unleashed and a hawk unjessed.

 

And yet—what happened to men in war?

Why were they all going out to war?

 

He brooded a moment. It wasn’t slavery,

That stale red-herring of Yankee knavery

Nor even states-rights, at least not solely,

But something so dim that it must be holy.

A voice, a fragrance, a taste of wine,

A face half-seen in old candleshine,

A yellow river, a blowing dust,

Something beyond you that you must trust,

Something so shrouded it must be great,

The dead men building the living State

From ’simmon-seed on a sandy bottom,

The woman South in her rivers laving

That body whiter than new-blown cotton

And savage and sweet as wild-orange-blossom,

The dark hair streams on the barbarous bosom,

If there ever has been a land worth saving—

In Dixie land, I’ll take my stand,

And live and die for Dixie! . . .

 

And yet—and yet—in some cold Northern room,

Does anyone else stare out the obdurate moon

With doubtful passion, seeing his toys of fighting

Scribbled all over with such silver writing

From such a heart of peace, they seem the stale

Cast properties of a dead and childish tale?

And does he see, too soon,

Over the horse, over the horse and rider,

The grey, soft swathing shadowness of the spider,

Spinning his quiet loom?

No—no other man is cursed

With such doubleness of eye,

They can hunger, they can thirst,

But they know for what and why.

 

I can drink the midnight out,

And rise empty, having dined.

For my courage and my doubt

Are a double strand of mind,

And too subtly intertwined.

They are my flesh, they are my bone,

My shame and my foundation-stone.

I was born alone, to live alone.

 

Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,

Eyes that are neither black nor grey,

Why do you haunt me, night and day?

 

Sea-changing eyes, with the deep, drowned glimmer

Of bar-gold crumbling from sunken ships,

Where the sea-dwarfs creep through the streaked, green shimmer

To press the gold to their glass-cold lips.

They sculpture the gold for a precious ring,

In the caverns under the under-skies,

They would marry the sea to a sailor-king!

You have taken my heart from me, sea-born eyes.

You have taken it, yes, but I do not know.

There are too many roads where I must go.

There are too many beds where I have slept

For a night unweeping, to quit unwept,

And it needs a king to marry the sea.

 

Why have you taken my heart from me?

I am not justice nor loyalty.

I am the shape of the weathercock,

That all winds come to and all winds mock.

You are the image of sea-carved stone,

The silent thing that can suffer alone,

The little women are easier,

The easy women make lighter love,

I will not take your face to the war,

I will not carry your cast-off glove.

 

Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,

Heart and body like sea-blown spray,

I cannot forget you, night or day.

 

So Wingate pondered in Wingate Hall,

And hated and loved in a single breath,

As he tried to unriddle the doubtful scrawl

Of war and courage and love and death,

And then was suddenly nothing but sleep—

And tomorrow they marched—to a two-months chasing

Of Yankees running away like sheep

And peace in time for the Macon racing.

 

He got in his bed. Where the moonlight poured,

It lay like frost on a sleeping sword.

It was stuffy at night in the cabins, stuffy but warm.

And smells are a matter of habit. So, if the air

Was thick as black butter with the commingled smells

Of greens and fried fat and field-sweat and heavy sleep,

The walls were well-chinked, the low roof kept out the rain.

Not like the tumble-down cabins at Zachary’s place

Where the field-hands lived all year on hominy-grits

And a piece of spoiled pork at Christmas.

                                            But Zachary

Was a mean man out of the Bottoms, no quality to him.

Wingate was quality. Wingate cared for its own.

A Wingate cabin was better than most such cabins,

You might have called it a sty, had they set you there;

A Middle Age serf might have envied the well-chinked walls.

While as for its tenants then, being folk unversed

In any law but the law of the Wingate name,

They were glad to have it, glad for fire on the hearth,

A roof from the dark-veined wind.

                                          Their bellies were warm

And full of food. They were heavy in love with each other.

They liked their cabin and lying next to each other,

Long nights of winter when the slow-burning pine-knots

Danced ghosts and witches over the low, near ceiling,

Short nights of summer, after the work of the fields,

When the hot body aches with the ripened sweetness

And the children and the new tunes are begotten together.

 

“What you so wakeful for, black boy?”

                                          “Thinkin’, woman.”

“You got no call to be thinkin’, little black boy,

Thinkin’s a trouble, a h’ant lookin’ over de shoulder,

Set yo’ head on my breas’ and forget about thinkin’.”

 

“I got my head on yo’ breas’, and it’s sof’ dere, woman,

Sof’ and sweet as a mournin’ out of de Scriptures,

Sof’ as two Solomon doves. But I can’t help thinkin’.”

 

“Ain’t I good enough for you no more, black boy?

Don’ you love me no more dat you mus’ keep thinkin’?”

 

“You’s better’n good to me and I loves you, woman,

Till I feels like Meshuck down in de fiery furnace,

Till I feels like God’s own chile. But I keeps on thinkin’,

Wonderin’ what I’d feel like if I was free.”

 

“Hush, black boy, hush for de Lord’s sake!”

                                         “But listen, woman——”

 

“Hush yo’self, black boy, lean yo’self on my breas’,

Talk like that and paterollers’ll git you,

Swinge you all to bits with a blacksnake whip,

Squinch-owl carry yo’ talk to de paterollers,

It ain’t safe to talk like that.”

                                “I got to, woman,

I got a feelin’ in my heart.”

                                 “Den you sot on dat feelin’!

Never heard you talk so in all my born days!

Ain’t we got a good cabin here?”

                                  “Sho’, we got a good cabin.”

“Ain’t we got good vittles, ain’t old Mistis kind to us?”

 

“Sho’ we got good vittles, and ole Mistis she’s kind.

I’se mighty fond of ole Mistis.”

                              “Den what you talkin’,

You brash fool-nigger?”

                      “I just got a feelin’, woman.

Ole Marse Billy, he’s goin’ away tomorrow,

Marse Clay, he’s goin’ with him to fight de Yankees,

All of ’em goin’, yes suh.”

                        “And what if dey is?”

 

“Well, sposin’ de Yankees beats?”

                                  “Ain’t you got no sense, nigger?

Like to see any ole Yankees lick ole Marse Billy

And young Marse Clay!”

                     “Hi, woman, ain’t dat de trufe!”

“Well, den——”

             “But I sees ’em all, jus’ goin’ and goin’,

Goin’ to war like Joshua, goin’ like David,

And it makes me want to be free. Ain’t you never thought

At all about bein’ free?”

                        “Sho’, co’se I thought of it.

I always reckoned when ole Marse Billy died,

Old Mistis mebbe gwine to set some of us free,

Mebbe she will.”

                     “But we-uns gwine to be old den,

We won’t be young and have the use of our hands,

We won’t see our young ’uns growin’ up free around us,

We won’t have the strength to hoe our own co’n ourselves,

I want to be free, like me, while I got my strength.”

 

“You might be a lot worse off and not be free,

What’d you do if ole man Zachary owned us?”

 

“Kill him, I reckon.”

                    “Hush, black boy, for God’s sake hush!”

 

“I can’t help it, woman. Dey ain’t so many like him

But what dey is is too pizen-mean to live.

Can’t you hear dat feelin’ I got, woman? I ain’t scared

Of talk and de paterollers, and I ain’t mean.

I’se mighty fond of ole Mistis and ole Marse Billy,

I’se mighty fond of ’em all at de Big House,

I wouldn’t be nobody else’s nigger for nothin’.

But I hears ’em goin’ away, all goin’ away,

With horses and guns and things, all stompin’ and wavin’,

And I hears de chariot-wheels and de Jordan River,

Rollin’ and rollin’ and rollin’ thu’ my sleep,

And I wants to be free. I wants to see my chillun

Growin’ up free, and all bust out of Egypt!

I wants to be free like an eagle in de air,

Like an eagle in de air.”

Iron-filings scattered over a dusty

Map of crook-cornered States in yellow and blue.

Little, grouped male and female iron-filings,

Scattered over a patchwork-quilt whose patches

Are the red-earth stuff of Georgia, the pine-bough green of Vermont.

Here you are clustered as thick as a clump of bees

In swarming time. The clumps make cities and towns.

Here you are strewn at random, like single seeds

Lost out of the wind’s pocket.

                            But now, but now,

The thunderstone has fallen on your map

And all the iron-filings shiver and move

Under the grippings of that blinded force,

The cold pull of the ash-and-cinder star.

 

The map is vexed with the long battle-worms

Of filings, clustered and moving.

                                  If it is

An enemy of the sun who has so stolen

Power from a burnt star to do this work,

Let the bleak essence of the utter cold

Beyond the last gleam of the most outpost light

Freeze in his veins forever.

                           But if it is

A fault in the very metal of the heart,

We and our children must acquit that fault

With the old bloody wastage, or give up

Playing the father to it.

                      O vexed and strange,

Salt-bitter, apple-sweet, strong-handed life!

Your million lovers cast themselves like sea

Against your mountainy breast, with a clashing noise

And a proud clamor—and like sea recoil,

Sucked down beneath the forefoot of the new

Advancing surf. They feed the battle-worms,

Not only War’s, but in the second’s pause

Between the assaulting and the broken wave,

The voices of the lovers can be heard,

The sea-gull cry.

Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian,

Hand like a ham and arms that could wrestle a bull,

A roast of a man, all solid meat and good fat,

A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man,

Roused out of his wife’s arms. The dawn outside

Was ruddy as his big cheeks. He yawned and stretched

Gigantically, hawking and clearing his throat.

His wife, hair tousled around her like tousled corn,

Stared at him with sleep-blind eyes.

                                    “Jake, it ain’t come morning,

Already yet?”

                 He nodded and started to dress.

She burrowed deeper into the bed for a minute

And then threw off the covers.

                               They didn’t say much

Then, or at breakfast. Eating was something serious.

But he looked around the big kitchen once or twice

In a puzzled way, as if trying hard to remember it.

She too, when she was busy with the first batch

Of pancakes, burnt one or two, because she was staring

At the “SALT” on the salt-box, for no particular reason.

The boy ate with them and didn’t say a word,

Being too sleepy.

                   Afterwards, when the team

Was hitched up and waiting, with the boy on the seat,

Holding the reins till Jake was ready to take them,

Jake didn’t take them at once.

                            The sun was up now,

The spilt-milk-mist of first morning lay on the farm,

Jake looked at it all with those same mildly-puzzled eyes,

The red barn, the fat rich fields just done with the winter,

Just beginning the work of another year.

The boy would have to do the rest of the planting.

 

He blew on his hands and stared at his wife dumbly.

He cleared his throat.

                     “Well, good-by, Minnie,” he said,

“Don’t you hire any feller for harvest without you write me,

And if any more of those lightning-rodders come around,

We don’t want no more dum lightning-rods.”

                                                   He tried

To think if there was anything else, but there wasn’t.

She suddenly threw her big, red arms around his neck,

He kissed her with clumsy force.

                                      Then he got on the wagon

And clucked to the horses as she started to cry.

Up in the mountains where the hogs are thin

And razorbacked, wild Indians of hogs,

The laurel’s green in April—and if the nights

Are cold as the cold cloud of watersmoke

Above a mountain-spring, the midday sun

Has heat enough in it to make you sweat.

 

They are a curious and most native stock,

The lanky men, the lost, forgotten seeds

Spilled from the first great wave-march toward the West

And set to sprout by chance in the deep cracks

Of that hill-billy world of laurel-hells.

They keep the beechwood-fiddle and the salt

Old-fashioned ballad-English of our first

Rowdy, corn-liquor-drinking, ignorant youth;

Also the rifle and the frying-pan,

The old feud-temper and the old feud-way

Of thinking strangers better shot on sight

But treating strangers that one leaves unshot

With border-hospitality.

                        The girls

Have the brief-blooming, rhododendron-youth

Of pioneer women, and the black-toothed age.

And if you yearn to meet your pioneers,

You’ll find them there, the same men, inbred sons

Of inbred sires perhaps, but still the same;

A pioneer-island in a world that has

No use for pioneers—the unsplit rock

Of Fundamentalism, calomel,

Clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle-tunes

And a hard God.

               They are our last frontier.

They shot the railway-train when it first came,

And when the Fords first came, they shot the Fords.

It could not save them. They are dying now

Or being educated, which is the same.

One need not weep romantic tears for them,

But when the last moonshiner buys his radio,

And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl

Is civilized with a mail-order dress,

Something will pass that was American

And all the movies will not bring it back.

 

They are misfit and strange in our new day,

In Sixty-One they were not quite so strange,

Before the Fords, before the day of the Fords . . .

 

Luke Breckinridge, his rifle on his shoulder,

Slipped through green forest alleys toward the town,

A gawky boy with smoldering eyes, whose feet

Whispered the crooked paths like moccasins.

He wasn’t looking for trouble, going down,

But he was on guard, as always. When he stopped

To scoop some water in the palm of his hand

From a sweet trickle between moss-grown rocks,

You might have thought him careless for a minute,

But when the snapped stick cracked six feet behind him

He was all sudden rifle and hard eyes.

The pause endured a long death-quiet instant,

Then he knew who it was.

                         “Hi, Jim,” he said,

Lowering his rifle. The green laurel-screen

Hardly had moved, but Jim was there beside him.

The cousins looked at each other. Their rifles seemed

To look as well, with much the same taut silentness.

“Goin’ to town, Luke?”

                      “Uh-huh, goin’ to town,

You goin’?”

            “Looks as if I was goin’.”

                                      “Looks

As if you was after squirrels.”

                              “I might be.

You goin’ after squirrels?” “I might be, too.”

“Not so many squirrels near town.”

                                   “No, reckon there’s not.”

 

Jim hesitated. His gaunt hands caressed

The smooth guard of his rifle. His eyes were sharp.

“Might go along a piece together,” he said.

Luke didn’t move. Their eyes clashed for a moment,

Then Luke spoke, casually.

                            “I hear the Kelceys

Air goin’ to fight in this here war,” he said.

Jim nodded slowly, “Yuh, I heerd that too.”

He watched Luke’s trigger-hand.

                               “I might be goin’

Myself sometime,” he said reflectively

Sliding his own hand down. Luke saw the movement.

“We-uns don’t like the Kelceys much,” he said

With his eyes down to pinpoints.

                                Then Jim smiled.

“We-uns neither,” he said.

                           His hand slid back.

 

They went along together after that

But neither of them spoke for half-a-mile,

Then finally, Jim said, half-diffidently,

“You know who we air goin’ to fight outside?

I heard it was the British. Air that so?”

“Hell, no,” said Luke, with scorn. He puckered his brows.

“Dunno’s I rightly know just who they air.”

He admitted finally, “But ’tain’t the British.

It’s some trash-lot of furriners, that’s shore.

They call ’em Yankees near as I kin make it,

But they ain’t Injuns neither.”

                              “Well,” said Jim

Soothingly, “Reckon it don’t rightly matter

Long as the Kelceys take the other side.”

It was noon when the company marched to the railroad-station.

The town was ready for them. The streets were packed.

There were flags and streamers and pictures of Lincoln and Hamlin.

The bad little boys climbed up on the trees and yelled,

The good little boys had clean paper-collars on,

And swung big-eyed on white-painted wicket-gates,

Wanting to yell, and feeling like Fourth of July.

Somebody fastened a tin can full of firecrackers

To a yellow dog’s tail and sent him howling and racketing

The length of the street.

                        “There goes Jeff Davis!” said somebody,

And everybody laughed, and the little boys

Punched each other and squealed between fits of laughing

“There goes Jeff Davis—lookit ole yellow Jeff Davis!”

And then the laugh died and rose again in a strange

Half-shrill, half-strangled unexpected shout

As they heard the Hillsboro’ Silver Cornet Band

Swinging “John Brown’s Body” ahead of the soldiers.

I have heard that soul of crowd go out in the queer

Groan between laughter and tears that baffles the wise.

I have heard that whanging band.

 

“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree.”

Double-roll on the snare-drums, double squeal of the fife,

“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”

Clash of the cymbals zinging, throaty blare of cornets,

“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”

“On to Richmond! On to Richmond! On to Richmond!”

“Yeah! There they come! Yeah! Yeah!”

And they came, the bearskin drum-major leading the band,

Twirling his silver-balled baton with turkey-cock pomp,

The cornet-blowers, the ranks. The drum-major was fine,

But the little boys thought the captain was even finer,

He looked just like a captain out of a book

With his sword and his shoulder-straps and his discipline-face.

He wasn’t just Henry Fairfield, he was a captain,

—Henry Fairfield worried about his sword,

Hoping to God that he wouldn’t drop his sword,

And wondering hotly whether his discipline-face

Really looked disciplined or only peevish—

“Yeah! There they come! There’s Jack! There’s Charlie! Yeah! Yeah!”

The color-guard with the stiff, new flapping flag,

And the ranks and the ranks and the ranks, the amateur

Blue, wavering ranks, in their ill-fitting tight coats,

Shoulders galled already by their new guns,

—They were three-months’ men, they had drilled in civilian clothes

Till a week ago—“There’s Charlie! There’s Hank, yeah, yeah!”

“On to Richmond, boys! Three cheers for Abe Lincoln!

Three cheers for the boys! Three groans for old Jeff Davis

And the dirty Rebs!”

“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”

 

Jack Ellyat, marching, saw between blue shoulders

A blur of faces. They all were faces he knew,

Old Mrs. Cobb with her wart and her Paisley shawl,

Little George Freeman, the slim Tucker girls,

All of them cheering and shouting—and all of them strange

Suddenly, different, faces he’d never seen.

Faces somehow turned into one crowd-face.

His legs went marching along all right but they felt

Like somebody else’s legs, his mind was sucked dry.

It was real, they were going away, the town was cheering them.

Henry Fairfield was marching ahead with his sword.

Just as he’d thought about it a thousand times,

These months—but it wasn’t the way that he’d thought about it.

“On to Richmond! On to Richmond! On to Richmond!”

There were Mother and Father and Jane and the house.

Jane was waving a flag. He laughed and called to them.

But his voice was stiff in his throat, not like his real voice.

This, everything, it was too quick, too crowded, not Phaëton

Charging his snarling horses at a black sea,

But a numb, hurried minute with legs that marched

Mechanically, feeling nothing at all.

The white crowd-face—the sweat on the red seamed neck

Of the man ahead—“On to Richmond!”—blue shoulders bobbing—

Flags—cheering—somebody kissed him—Ellen Baker—

She was crying—wet mouth of tears—didn’t want her to kiss him—

Why did she want to—the station—halt—Mother and Jane.

 

The engineer wore a flag in his coat-lapel.

The engine had “On to Richmond!” chalked all over it.

Nothing to say now—Mother looks tired to death—

I wish I weren’t going—no, I’m glad that I am—

The damn band’s playing “John Brown’s Body” again,

I wish they’d stop it!—I wish to God we could start—

There—close up, men!—oh my God, they’ve let Ned out!

I told them for God’s sake to lock him up in the cellar,

But they’ve let him out—maybe he got out by himself—

He’s got too much sense—“No, down, Ned! Down, good dog!

Down, I tell you!—”

                            “Good-by, boys! Good-by! We’ll hang Jeff Davis!”

 

The engine squealed, the packed train started to move.

Ned wanted to come, but they wouldn’t let him come.

They had to kick him away, he couldn’t see why.

In another column, footsore Curly Hatton

Groaned at the thought of marching any more.

His legs weren’t built for marching and they knew it,

Butterball-legs under a butterball-body.

The plump good-tempered face with its round eyes

Blue and astonished as a china-doll’s,

Stared at the road ahead and hated it

Because there was so much of it ahead

And all of it so dry.

                     He didn’t mind

The rest so much. He didn’t even mind

Being the one sure necessary joke

Of the whole regiment. He’d always been

A necessary joke—fat people were.

Fat babies always were supposed to laugh.

Fat little boys had fingers poked at them.

And, even with the road, and being fat,

You had a good time in this funny war,

Considering everything, and one thing most.

 

His mind slipped back two months. He saw himself

In the cool room at Weatherby’s Retreat

Where all the girls were sewing the new star

In the new flag for the first volunteers.

He hadn’t thought of fighting much before,

He was too easy-going. If Virginia

Wanted secession, that was her affair.

It seemed too bad to break the Union up

After some seventy years of housekeeping.

But he could understand the way you’d feel

If you were thin and angry at the Yanks.

He knew a lot of Yankees that he liked,

But then he liked most people, on the whole

Although most girls and women made him shy.

He loved the look of them and the way they walked,

He loved their voices and their little sweet mouths,

But something always seemed to hold him back,

When he was near them.

                      He was too fat, too friendly,

Too comfortable for dreams, too easy-shy.

The porcelain dolls stood on the mantelpiece,

Waiting such slim and arrant cavaliers

As porcelain dolls must have to make them proud,

They had no mercy for fat Cupidons,

Not even Lucy, all the years before,

And Lucy was the porcelain belle of the world!

And so when she said.

                      And he couldn’t believe

At first.

         But she was silver and fire and steel

That day of the new stars and the new flag,

Fire and bright steel for the invading horde

And silver for the men who drove them off,

And so she sewed him in her flag and heart:

Though even now, he couldn’t believe she had

In spite of all the letters and the socks

And kissing him before he went away.

But it was so—the necessary joke

Made into a man at last, a man in love

And loved by the most porcelain belle of the world.

And he was ready to march to the world’s end

And fight ten million Yanks to keep it so.

 

“Oh God, after we’re married—the cool night

Over the garden—and Lucy sitting there

In her blue dress while the big stars come out.”

His face was funny with love and footsore pride,

The man beside him saw it, gave a laugh,

“Curly’s thinking it’s time for a julep, boys!

Hot work for fat men, Curly!”

The crows fly over the Henry House, through the red sky of evening, cawing,

Judith Henry, bedridden, watches them through the clouded glass of old sight.

(July is hot in Virginia—a parched, sun-leathered farmer sawing

Dry sticks with a cicada-saw that creaks all the lukewarm night.)

 

But Judith Henry’s hands are cool in spite of all midsummer’s burning,

Cool, muted and frail with age like the smoothness of old yellow linen, the cool touch of old, dulled rings.

Her years go past her in bed like falling waters and the waters of a millwheel turning,

And she is not ill content to lie there, dozing and calm, remembering youth, to the gushing of those watersprings.

 

She has known Time like the cock of red dawn and Time like a tired clock slowing;

She has seen so many faces and bodies, young and then old, so much life, so many patterns of death and birth.

She knows that she must leave them soon. She is not afraid to flow with that river’s flowing.

But the wrinkled earth still hangs at her sufficed breast like a weary child, she is unwilling to go while she still has milk for the earth.

 

She will go in her sleep, most likely, she has the sunk death-sleep of the old already,

(War-bugles by the Potomac, you cannot reach her ears with your brass lyric, piercing the crowded dark.)

It does not matter, the farm will go on, the farm and the children bury her in her best dress, the plow cut its furrow, steady,

(War-horses of the Shenandoah, why should you hurry so fast to tramp the last ashy fire from so feeble and retired a spark?)

 

There is nothing here but a creek and a house called the Henry House, a farm and a bedridden woman and people with country faces.

There is nothing for you here. And La Haye Sainte was a quiet farm and the mile by it a quiet mile.

And Lexington was a place to work in like any one of a dozen dull, little places.

And they raised good crops at Blenheim till the soldiers came and spoiled the crops for a while.

 

The red evening fades into twilight, the crows have gone to their trees, the slow, hot stars are emerging.

It is cooler now on the hill—and in the camps it is cooler, where the untried soldiers find their bivouac hard.

Where, from North and South, the blind wrestlers of armies converge on the forgotten house like the double pincers of an iron claw converging.

And Johnston hurries his tired brigades from the Valley, to bring them up in time before McDowell can fall on Beauregard.

The congressmen came out to see Bull Run,

The congressmen who like free shows and spectacles.

They brought their wives and carriages along,

They brought their speeches and their picnic-lunch,

Their black constituent-hats and their devotion:

Some even brought a little whiskey, too,

(A little whiskey is a comforting thing

For congressmen in the sun, in the heat of the sun.)

The bearded congressmen with orator’s mouths,

The fine, clean-shaved, Websterian congressmen,

Come out to see the gladiator’s show

Like Iliad gods, wrapped in the sacred cloud

Of Florida-water, wisdom and bay-rum,

Of free cigars, democracy and votes,

That lends such portliness to congressmen.

(The gates fly wide, the bronze troop marches out

Into the stripped and deadly circus-ring,

“Ave, Caesar!” the cry goes up, and shakes

The purple awning over Caesar’s seat.)

“Ave, Caesar! Ave, O congressmen,

We who are about to die,

Salute you, congressmen!”

 

Eleven States,

New York, Rhode Island, Maine,

Connecticut, Michigan and the gathered West,

Salute you, congressmen!

The red-fezzed Fire-Zouaves, flamingo-bright,

Salute you, congressmen!

The raw boys still in their civilian clothes,

Salute you, congressmen!

The second Wisconsin in its homespun grey,

Salutes you, congressmen!

The Garibaldi Guards in cocksfeather hats,

Salute you, congressmen!

The Second Ohio with their Bedouin-caps,

Salutes you, congressmen!

Sherman’s brigade, grey-headed Heintzelman,

Ricketts’ and Griffin’s doomed and valiant guns,

The tough, hard-bitten regulars of Sykes

Who covered the retreat with the Marines,

Burnside and Porter, Willcox and McDowell,

All the vast, unprepared, militia-mass

Of boys in red and yellow Zouave pants,

Who carried peach-preserves inside their kits

And dreamt of being generals overnight;

The straggling companies where every man

Was a sovereign and a voter—the slack regiments

Where every company marched a different step;

The clumsy and unwieldy-new brigades

Not yet distempered into battle-worms;

The whole, huge, innocent army, ready to fight

But only half-taught in the tricks of fighting,

Ready to die like picture-postcard boys

While fighting still had banners and a sword

And just as ready to run in blind mob-panic,

Salutes you with a vast and thunderous cry,

Ave, Caesar, ave, O congressmen,

Ave, O Iliad gods who forced the fight!

You bring your carriages and your picnic-lunch

To cheer us in our need.

                        You come with speeches,

Your togas smell of heroism and bay-rum.

You are the people and the voice of the people

And, when the fight is done, your carriages

Will bear you safely, through the streaming rout

Of broken troops, throwing their guns away.

You come to see the gladiator’s show,

But from a high place, as befits the wise:

You will not see the long windrows of men

Strewn like dead pears before the Henry House

Or the stone-wall of Jackson breathe its parched

Devouring breath upon the failing charge,

Ave, Caesar, ave, O congressmen,

Cigar-smoke wraps you in a godlike cloud,

And if you are not to depart from us

As easily and divinely as you came,

It hardly matters.

                   Fighting Joe Hooker once

Said with that tart, unbridled tongue of his

That made so many needless enemies,

“Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?”

                                  The phrase

Stings with a needle sharpness, just or not,

But even he was never heard to say,

“Who ever saw a dead congressman?”

And yet, he was a man with a sharp tongue.

The day broke, hot and calm. In the little farm-houses

That are scattered here and there in that rolling country

Of oak and rail-fence, crooked creeks and second-growth pine,

The early-risers stand looking out of the door

At the long dawn-shadows for a minute or two

—Shadows are always cool—but the blue-glass sky

Is fusing with heat even now, heat that prickles the hairs

On the back of your hand.

                         They sigh and turn back to the house.

“Looks like a scorcher today, boys!”

                                     They think already

Of the cool jug of vinegar-water down by the hedge.

 

Judith Henry wakened with the first light,

She had the short sleep of age, and the long patience.

She waited for breakfast in vague, half-drowsy wonderment

At various things. Yesterday some men had gone by

And stopped for a drink of water. She’d heard they were soldiers.

She couldn’t be sure. It had seemed to worry the folks

But it took more than soldiers and such to worry her now.

Young people always worried a lot too much.

No soldiers that had any sense would fight around here.

She’d had a good night. Today would be a good day.

A mile and a half away, before the Stone Bridge,

A Union gun opened fire.

Six miles away, McDowell had planned his battle

And planned it well, as far as such things can be planned—

A feint at one point, a flanking march at another

To circle Beauregard’s left and crumple it up.

There were Johnston’s eight thousand men to be reckoned with

But Patterson should be holding them, miles away,

And even if they slipped loose from Patterson’s fingers

The thing might still be done.

                              If you take a flat map

And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,

The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.

The science of war is moving live men like blocks.

And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.

But it takes time to mold your men into blocks

And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies

Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,

They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,

And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.

—A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left

Of another string of blocks and crunching it up—

It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,

But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow

To move, when they start they take too long on the way—

The General loses his stars and the block-men die

In unstrategic defiance of martial law

Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.

McDowell was neither a fool nor a fighting fool;

He knew his dice, he knew both armies unready,

But congressmen and nation wanted a battle

And he felt their hands on his shoulders, forcing his play.

 

He knew well enough when he played that he played for his head

As Beauregard and Johnston were playing for theirs,

So he played with the skill he had—and does not lie

Under a cupolaed gloom on Riverside Drive.

Put Grant in his place that day and with those same dice,

Grant might have done little better.

                                    Wherefore, now,

Irvin McDowell, half-forgotten general,

Who tried the game and found no luck in the game

And never got the chance to try it again

But did not backbite the gamblers who found more luck in it

Then or later in double-edged reminiscences;

If any laurel can grow in the sad-colored fields

Between Bull Run and Cub Run and Cat Hairpin Bend

You should have a share of it for your hardworking ghost

Because you played as you could with your cold, forced dice

And neither wasted your men like the fighting fools

Nor posed as an injured Napoleon twenty years later.

Meanwhile, McDowell watched his long flanking column

File by, on the Warrentown pike, in the first dawn-freshness.

“Gentlemen, that’s a big force,” he said to his staff.

Beauregard, eager sabreur, whose heart was a French

Print of a sabretasche-War with “La Gloire” written under it,

Lovable, fiery, bizarre, picturesque as his name,

Galloped toward Mitchell’s Ford with bald, quiet Joe Johnston,

The little precise Scotch-dominie of a general,

Stubborn as flint, in advance not always so lucky,

In retreat more dangerous than a running wolf—

Slant shadow, sniffing the traps and the poisoned meat,

And going on to pause and slash at the first

Unwary dogs before the hunters came up.

Grant said of him once,

“I was always anxious with Joe Johnston in front of me,

I was never half so anxious in front of Lee.”

He kissed his friends in the Nelson-way we’ve forgotten,

He could make men cheer him after six-weeks retreating.

Another man said of him, after the war was done,

Still with that puzzled comparison we find

When Lee, the reticent sword, comes into the question,

“Yes, Lee was a great general, a good man;

But I never wanted to put my arms round his neck

As I used to want to with Johnston.”

                                  The two sayings

Make a good epitaph for so Scotch a ghost,

Or would if they were all.

                         They are not quite all,

He had to write his reminiscences, too,

And tell what he would have done if it had not been

For Davis and chance and a dozen turns of the wheel.

That was the thistle in him—the other strain—

But he was older then.

                     I’d like to have seen him

That day as he galloped along beside Beauregard,

Sabreur and dominie planning the battle-lines.

They’d ordered Jackson up to the threatened left

But Beauregard was sure that the main assault

Would come on the right. He’d planned it so—a good plan—

But once the blocks start moving, they keep on moving.

The hands of the scuffed brown clock in the kitchen of the Henry House point to nine-forty-five.

Judith Henry does not hear the clock, she hears in the sky a vast dim roar like piles of heavy lumber crashingly falling.

They are carrying her in her bed to a ravine below the Sudley Road, maybe she will be safe there, maybe the battle will go by and leave her alive.

The crows have been scared from their nests by the strange crashing, they circle in the sky like a flight of blackened leaves, wheeling and calling.

Back at Centerville, there are three-months’ men,

A Pennsylvania regiment, a New York Battery.

They hear the spent wave of the roar of the opening guns,

But they are three-months’ men, their time is up today.

They would have fought yesterday or a week ago,

But then they were still enlisted—today they are not—

Their time is up, and there can’t be much use or sense

In fighting longer than you’ve promised to fight.

They pack up their things and decide they’d better go home,

And quietly march away from that gathering roar.

Luke Breckinridge, crouched by the Warrentown pike,

Saw stuffed dolls in blue coats and baggy trousers

Go down like squirrels under the rifle-cracks.

His eyes glowed as a bullet ripped his sleeve

And he felt well. Armies weren’t such a much,

Too damn many orders, too damn much saluting,

Too many damn officers you weren’t allowed

To shoot when they talked mean to you because

They were your officers, which didn’t make sense.

But this was something he could understand,

Except for those dirty stinkers of big guns,

It wasn’t right to shoot you with big guns

But it was a good scrap except for that—

Carried a little high, then . . . change it . . . good . . .

Though men were hard to miss when you were used

To squirrels. His eyes were narrow. He hardly heard

The officer’s voice. The woods in front of him

Were full of Kelceys he was going to kill,

Blue-coated Kelcey dolls in baggy trousers.

It was a beautiful and sufficing sight.

Shippy, the little man with the sharp rat-eyes,

Saw someone run in front of them waving a sword;

Then they were going along toward a whining sound

That ran like cold spring-water along his spine.

God, he was in for it now! His sharp rat-eyes

Flickered around and about him hopelessly.

If a fellow could only drop out, if a fellow could only

Pretend he was hurt a little and then drop out

Behind a big, safe oak-tree—no use—no use—

He was in for it, now. He couldn’t get away.

“Come on, boys—come on, men—clean them out with the bayonet!”

He saw a rail-fence ahead, a quiet rail-fence,

But men were back of it—grey lumps—a million bees

Stinging the air—Oh Jesus, the corporal’s got it—

He couldn’t shoot, even—he was too scared to shoot—

His legs took him on—he couldn’t stop his legs

Or the weak urine suddenly trickling down them.

Curly Hatton, toiling along the slow

Crest of the Henry Hill, over slippery ground,

Glanced at the still-blue sky that lay so deep

Above the little pines, so pooled, so calm.

He thought, with the slow drowsiness of fatigue,

Of Lucy feeding the white, greedy swans

On the blue pool by Weatherby’s Retreat.

They stretched their necks, and clattered with their wings.

There was a fragrance sleeping in her hair.

“Close up, folks—don’t straggle—we’re going into action!”

His butterball-legs moved faster—Lucy—Lucy—

Jack Ellyat heard the guns with a knock at his heart

When he first heard them. They were going to be in it, soon.

He wondered how it would feel. They would win, of course,

But how would it feel? He’d never killed anything much.

Ducks and rabbits, but ducks and rabbits weren’t men.

He’d never even seen a man killed, a man die,

Except Uncle Amos, and Uncle Amos was old.

He saw a red sop spreading across the close

Feathers of a duck’s breast—it had been all right,

But now it made him feel sick for a while, somehow.

Then they were down on the ground, and they were firing,

And that was all right—just fire as you fired at drill.

Was anyone firing at them? He couldn’t tell.

There was a stone bridge. Were there rebels beyond the bridge?

The shot he was firing now might go and kill rebels

But it didn’t feel like it.

                            A man down the line

Fell and rolled flat, with a minor coughing sound

And then was quiet. Ellyat felt the cough

In the pit of his stomach a minute.

But, after that, it was just like a man falling down.

It was all so calm except for their guns and the distant

Shake in the air of cannon. No more men were hit,

And, after a while, they all got up and marched on.

If Rebels had been by the bridge, the rebels were gone,

And they were going on somewhere, you couldn’t say where,

Just marching along the way that they always did.

The only funny thing was, leaving the man

Who had made that cough, back there in the trampled grass

With the red stain sopping through the blue of his coat

Like the stain on a duck’s breast. He hardly knew the man

But it felt funny to leave him just lying there.

Judith Henry, Judith Henry, they have moved you back at last, in doubt and confusion, to the little house where you know every knothole by heart.

It is not safe, but now there is no place safe, you are between the artillery and the artillery, and the incessant noise comes to your dim ears like the sea-roar within a shell where you are lying.

The walls of the house are riddled, the brown clock in the kitchen gouged by a bullet, a jar leaks red preserves on the cupboard shelf where the shell-splinter came and tore the cupboard apart.

The casual guns do not look for you, Judith Henry, they find you in passing merely and touch you only a little, but the touch is enough to give your helpless body five sudden wounds and leave you helplessly dying.

Wingate gentled Black Whistle’s pawing

With hand and wisdom and horseman’s play

And listened anew to the bulldogs gnawing

Their bone of iron, a mile away.

There was a wood that a bonfire crowned

With thick dark smoke without flame for neighbor,

And the dull, monotonous, heavy sound

Of a hill or a woman in too-long labor,

But that was all for the Black Horse Troop

And had been all since the day’s beginning,

That stray boy beating his metal hoop

And the tight-lipped wonder if they were winning.

Wainscott Bristol, behind his eyes,

Was getting in bed with a sweet-toothed wench,

Huger Shepley felt for his dice

And Stuart Cazenove swore in French

“Mille diables and Yankee blood!

How long are we going to stick in the mud?”

While a Cotter hummed with a mocking sigh,

“ ‘If you want a good time, jine the cavalry!’ ”

“Stuart’s in it, Wade Hampton’s in it.”

“The Yanks’ll quit in another minute!”

“General Beau’s just lost us!”

                              “Steady!”

“And he won’t find us until he’s ready!”

“It must be two—we’ve been here since six.”

“It’s Virginia up to her old-time tricks!

They never did trust a Georgia man,

But Georgia’ll fight while Virginia can!”

 

The restless talk was a simmering brew

That made the horses restless too;

They stamped and snuffled and pricked their ears—

There were cheers, off somewhere—but which side’s cheers?

Had the Yankees whipped? Were the Yankees breaking?

The whole troop grumbled and wondered, aching

For fighting or fleeing or fornicating

Or anything else except this bored waiting.

 

An aide rode up on a sweating mare

And they glowered at him with hostile stare.

He had been in it and they had not.

He had smelt the powder and heard the shot,

And they hated his soul and his martial noise

With the envious hate of little boys.

Then “Yaaih! Yaaih!”

                    —and Wingate felt

The whole troop lift like a lifted dart

And loosened the sabre at his belt,

And felt his chest too small for his heart.

Curly Hatton was nothing any more

But a dry throat and a pair of burnt black hands

That held a hot gun he was always firing

Though he no longer remembered why he fired.

They ran up a cluttered hill and took hacked ground

And held it for a while and fired for a while,

And then the blue men came and they ran away,

To go back, after a while, when the blue men ran.

There was a riddled house and a crow in a tree,

There was uneven ground. It was hard to run.

The gun was heavy and hot. There once had been

A person named Lucy and a flag and a star

And a cane chair beside wistarias

Where a nigger brought you a drink. These had ceased to exist.

There was only very hot sun and being thirsty.

Yells—crashings—screams from black lips—a dead, tattered crow

In a tattered tree. There had once been a person named Lucy

Who had had an importance. There was none of her now.

 

Up the hill again. Damn tired of running up hill.

And then he found he couldn’t run any more,

He had to fall down and be sick. Even that was hard,

Because somebody near kept making a squealing noise—

The dolefully nasty noise of a badly-hurt dog.

It got on his nerves and he tried to say something to it,

But it was he who made it, so he couldn’t stop it.

Jack Ellyat, going toward the battle again,

Saw the other side of the hill where Curly was lying,

Saw, for a little while, the two battered houses,

The stuffed dead stretched in numb, disorderly postures,

And heard for a while again that whining sound

That made you want to duck, and feel queer if you did.

 

To him it was noise and smoke and the powder-taste

And, once and again, through the smoke, for a moment seen,

Small, monstrous pictures, gone through the brain like light,

And yet forever bitten into the brain;

A marsh, a monstrous arras of live and dead

Still shaking under the thrust of the weaver’s hand,

The crowd of a deadly fair.

                           Then, orders again.

And they were going away from the smoke once more.

 

The books say “Keyes’ brigade made a late and weak

Demonstration in front of the Robinson house

And then withdrew to the left, by flank, down Young’s Branch,

Taking no further part in the day.”

                                  To Jack Ellyat

It was a deadly fair in a burning field

Where strange crowds rushed to and fro and strange drunkards lay

Sprawled in a stupor deeper than wine or sleep,

A whining noise you shrank from and wanted to duck at,

And one dead cough left behind them in the tall grass

With the slow blood sopping its clothes like the blood on a shot duck’s breast.

Judith Henry, Judith Henry, your body has born its ghost at

  last, there are no more pictures of peace or terror left in the

    broken machine of the brain that was such a cunning picture-maker:

Terrified ghost, so rudely dishoused by such casual violence, be

  at rest; there are others dishoused in this falling night, the

    falling night is a sack of darkness, indifferent as Saturn to

      wars or generals, indifferent to shame or victory.

War is a while but peace is a while and soon enough the earth-colored

  hands of the earth-workers will scoop the last buried

    shells and the last clotted bullet-slag from the racked embittered

      acre,

And the rustling visitors drive out fair Sundays to look at the

  monument near the rebuilt house, buy picture postcards and

    wonder dimly what you were like when you lived and what

      you thought when you knew you were going to die.

Wingate felt a frog in his throat

As he patted Black Whistle’s reeking coat

And reined him in for a minute’s breath.

He was hot as the devil and tired to death,

And both were glad for the sun in the West

And a panting second of utter rest,

While Wingate’s mind went patching together

Like a cobbler piecing out scraps of leather

The broken glimmers of what they’d done

Since the sun in the West was a rising sun,

The long, bored hours of shiftless waiting

And that single instant of pure, fierce hating

When the charge came down like a cataract

On a long blue beach of broken sand

And Thought was nothing but all was Act

And the sabre seemed to master the hand.

Wainscott Bristol, a raging terrier

Killing the Yankee that shot Phil Ferrier

With a cut that spattered the bloody brains

Over his saddle and bridle-reins,

One Cotter cursing, the other praying,

And both of them slashing like scythes of slaying,

Stuart Cazenove singing “Lord Randall”

And Howard Brooke as white as a candle,

While Father fought like a fiend in satin,

And killed as he quoted tag-ends of Latin,

The prisoners with their sick, dazed wonder

And the mouths of children caught in a blunder

And over it all, the guns, the thunder,

The pace, the being willing to die,

The stinging color of victory.

 

He remembered it all like a harsh, tense dream.

It had a color. It had a gleam.

But he had outridden and lost the rest

And he was alone with the bloody West

And a trampled road, and a black hill-crest.

 

The road and the bushes all about

Were cluttered with relics of Yankee rout,

Haversacks spilling their shirts and socks,

A burst canteen and a cartridge-box.

Rifles and cups trampled underfoot,

A woman’s locket, a slashed black boot

Stained and oozing along the slash

And a ripe pear crushed to a yellow mash.

Who had carried the locket and munched the pear,

And why was a dead cat lying there,

Stark and grinning, a furry sack,

With a red flannel tongue and a broken back?

You didn’t fight wars with a tabby-cat. . . .

He found he was telling the Yankees that,

They couldn’t hear him of course, but still . . .

He shut his eyes for a minute until

He felt less dizzy. There, that was better,

And the evening wind was chilly and keen—

—He’d have to write Mother some sort of letter—

—He’d promised Amanda a Yank canteen,

But he didn’t feel like getting it here,

Where that dead cat snickered from ear to ear—

 

Back in the pinewoods, clear and far,

A bugle sang like a falling star.

He shivered, turned Black Whistle around

And galloped hastily toward the sound.

Curly Hatton opened his eyes again.

A minute ago he had been marching, marching,

Forever up and down enormous hills

While his throat scratched with thirst and something howled—

But then there was a clear minute—and he was lying

In a long, crowded, strangely-churchly gloom

Where lanterns bobbed like marshlights in a swamp

And there was a perpetual rustling noise

Of dry leaves stirred by a complaining wind.

No, they were only voices of wounded men.

“Water. Water. Water. Water. Water.”

He heard the rain on the roof and sucked his lips.

“Water. Water. Water. Water. Water.”

Oh, heavy sluices of dark, sweet, Summer rain,

Pour down on me and wash me free again,

Cleanse me of battles, make my flesh smell sweet,

I am so sick of thirst, so tired of pain,

So stale with wounds and the heat!

Somebody went by, a doctor with red sleeves;

He stared at the red sleeves and tried to speak

But when he spoke, he whispered. This was a church.

He could see a dim altar now and a shadow-pulpit.

He was wounded. They had put the wounded men in a church.

Lucy’s face came to him a minute and then dissolved,

A drowned face, ebbing away with a smile on its mouth.

He had meant to marry that face in another church.

But he was dying instead. It was strange to die.

All night from the hour of three, the dead man’s hour, the rain

  falls in heavy gusts, in black irresistible streams as if the whole

    sky were falling in one wet huddle.

All night, living and dead sleep under it, without moving, on

  the field; the surgeons work in the church; the wounded moan;

    the dissevered fragments of companies and regiments look

      for each other, trying to come together.

In the morning, when the burial-parties go out, the rain is still

  falling, damping the powder of the three rounds fired over the

    grave; before the grave is well-dug, the bottom of the grave

      is a puddle.

All day long the Southern armies bury their dead to the sodden

  drums of the rain; all day the bugle calls a hoarse-throated

    “Taps”; the bugler lets the water run from his bugle-mouth

      and wipes it clean again and curses the rainy

        weather.

All night the Union army fled in retreat

Like horses scared by a shadow—a stumbling flood

Of panicky men who had been brave for a while

And might be brave again on another day

But now were merely children chased by the night

And each man tainting his neighbor with the same

Blind fear.

           When men or horses begin to run

Like that, they keep on running till they tire out

Unless a strong hand masters a bridle-rein.

Here there was no hand to master, no rein to clutch,

Where the riderless horses kicked their way through the crowd

And the congressmen’s carriages choked Cat Hairpin Bend.

Sykes and the regulars covered the retreat,

And a few brigades were kept in some sort of order,

But the rest—They tried to stop them at Centerville.

McDowell and his tired staff held a haggard conference.

But before the officers could order retreat

The men were walking away.

                           They had fought and lost.

They were going to Washington, they were going back

To their tents and their cooking-fires and their letters from Susie.

They were going back home to Maine or Vermont or Ohio,

And they didn’t care who knew it, and that was that.

 

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Johnston and Beauregard,

Now joined by the dusty Davis, found themselves

As dazed by their victory as their foes by defeat.

They had beaten one armed mob with another armed mob

And Washington was theirs for the simple act

Of stretching a hand to the apple up on the bough,

If they had known. But they could not know it then.

They too saw spectres—unbroken Union reserves

Moving to cut their supply-line near Manassas.

They called back the pursuit, such scattered pursuit as it was.

Their men were tired and disordered. The chance went by

While only the stiff-necked Jackson saw it clear

As a fighting-psalm or a phrase in Napoleon’s tactics.

He said to the surgeon who was binding his wound,

With a taciturn snap, “Give me ten thousand fresh troops

And I will be in Washington by tomorrow.”

But they could not give him the troops while there yet was time.

He had three days’ rations cooked for the Stonewall Brigade

And dourly awaited the order that never came.

He had always been at God’s orders, and God had used him

As an instrument in winning a certain fight.

Now, if God saw fit to give him the men and guns,

He would take Washington for the glory of God.

If He didn’t, it was God’s will and not to be questioned.

 

Meanwhile he could while the hours of waiting away

By seeing the Stonewall Brigade was properly fed,

Endeavoring, with that rigid kindness of his

To show Imboden his error in using profanity

—In the heat of battle many things might be excused,

But nothing excused profanity, even then—

And writing his Pastor at Lexington a letter

Enclosing that check for the colored Sunday-school

Which he’d promised, and, being busy, had failed to send.

There is not one word of Bull Run in all that letter

Except the mention of “a fatiguing day’s service.”

It would not have occurred to Jackson there might have been.

  By Pittsburg Landing, the turbid Tennessee

Sucks against black, soaked spiles with soil-colored waters.

That country is huge and disorderly, even now.

—This is Ellyat’s tune, this is no tune but his—

Country of muddy rivers, sombre and swollen,

Country of bronze wild turkeys and catfish-fries

And brushpile landings going back to the brush.

A province of mush and milk, a half-cleared forest,

A speckled guinea-cock that never was cooped

But ran away to grow his spurs by himself.

Neither North nor South, but crunching a root of its own

Between strong teeth—perhaps a wild-onion-root,

Perhaps a white stalk of arbutus, hardier there,

Than any phantom-arbutus of Eastern Springs.

A mudsill man with the river-wash in his ears,

Munching the coarse, good meal of a johnny-cake

Hot from the hob—even now it tastes of the brush,

The wilderness, the big lost star in the pines,

The brown river-dirt, the perpetual river-sound,

In spite of the sidewalks, in spite of the trolley-cars.

No trolley-car-bell can drown that river-sound,

Or take the loneliness out of the lost moon,

The night too big for a man, too lonesome and wide.

The vastness has been netted in railroad tracks

But it is still vast, uneasy.

                              And when the brief

Screech of the railway-whistle stabs at the trees

That grow so thick, so unplanned, so untidily strong

On either side of the two planned ribs of steel,

Ghost-steamboats answer it from the sucking brown water.

In Sixty-two, it was shaggy with wilderness still

For stretches and stretches of close-packed undergrowth,

Wild as a muskrat, ignorant of the axe;

Stretches and stretches where roughly-chinked log-cabins,

Two shouts and a holler away from the nearest neighbors,

Stood in a wisp of open. All night long

The cabin-people heard the chant of the trees,

The forest, hewn away from the painful clearing

For a day or a year, with sweat and back-breaking toil,

But waiting to come back, to crush the crude house

And the planted space with vines and trailers of green,

To quench the fire on the hearth with running green saps,

With a chant of green, with tiny green tendrils curling,

—This is Ellyat’s tune, this is no tune but his—

The railway-train goes by with a shrill, proud scream

And the woman comes to the door in a butternut dress

Hair tousled up in a knot on the back of her head,

A barefoot child at her skirt.

                              The train goes by.

They watch it with a slow wonder that is not pathos

Nor heroism but merely a slow wonder.

Jack Ellyat, in camp above Pittsburg Landing,

Speck in Grant’s Army of the Tennessee,

Thought of old fences in Connecticut

With a homesick mind.

                       This country was too new,

Too stragglingly-unplanned, too muddy with great,

Uncomfortable floods, too roughly cut

With a broad hatchet out of a hard tree.

 

It had seemed fine when he was mustered out

After Bull Run, to wear a veteran air,

And tell pink Ellen Baker about war

And how, as soon as he could re-enlist

He’d do it where he got a chance to fight—

Wet mouth of tears—he hadn’t wanted to kiss her

At first, but it was easier later on.

Why had he ever gone out to Chicago?

Why had he ever heard that shallow band

Whanging its brass along a Western street

And run to sign the muster-roll again?

Why had he ever talked about Bull Run

To these green, husky boys from Illinois

And Iowa, whose slang was different slang,

Who called suspenders galluses and swore

In the sharp pops of a mule-driver’s whip?

Bull Run—it had impressed them for a week

But then they started to call him “Bull Run Jack.” . . .

 

Henry Fairfield marching along with his sword,

All the old company marching after him

Back in McClellan’s army, back by the known

Potomac, back in the safe and friendly East;

All the papers telling how brave they were

And how, as soon as the roads dried up in the spring,

“The little Napoleon” would hammer the South to bits

With a blue thunderbolt.

                        And here he was

A lost pea, spilt at random in a lost war;

A Tennessee war that had no Tribunes or polish

Where he was the only Easterner in the whole

Strange-swearing regiment of Illinois farmers,

Alien as Rebels, and rough as all outdoors.

 

He wanted to get transferred, he wanted to be

Back with the company, back with the Eastern voices,

Back where nobody called him “Bull Run Jack”

And snickered at him for shaving every two days.

He’d written about it and Father knew a congressman

But nothing would happen—he’d never get away,

He’d stay being Bull Run Jack till the end of the war

And march through acres of hostile Tennessee mud

Till his legs dropped off, and never get to be Corporal.

He was sick of the war and the mud and the Western faces.

He hated the sight of his Illinois uniform.

He was sorry for himself. He felt with a vague

Soft blur of self-pity that he was really quite brave,

And if people only knew, they’d do something about it.

 

This is Ellyat’s tune, this is no tune but his.

Nine months have passed since McDowell reddened Bull Run,

Nine strong-hoofed months, but they have meant little to Ellyat.

What means the noise of the wind to the dust in the wind?

But the wind calls strange things out, calls strange men out,

A dozen pictures flash in front of the eyes

And are gone in a flash—

                          rough-bearded Tecumseh Sherman,

Who had tried most things, but being cursed with a taste

For honesty, had found small luck in his stars;

Ex-soldier, banker, lawyer, each in its turn,

Ex-head of a Southern military-school,

Untidy ex-president of a little horse-railroad;

Talkative, nervous, salty, Scotch-Irish fighter,

High-strung, quick-tempered, essentially modern-minded,

Stamping the length of the dusty corridors

Of a Western hotel with a dead cigar in his teeth,

Talking the war to himself, till the word goes round

The new general is crazy—

                          neat, handsome McClellan,

Ex-railroad president too, but a better railroad;

The fortunate youth, the highly-modern boy-wonder,

The snapping-eyed, brisk banner-salesman of war

With all the salesman’s gifts and the salesman’s ego;

Great organizer, with that magnetic spark

That pulls the heart from the crowd—and all of it spoiled

By the Napoleon-complex that haunts such men.

There never has been a young banner-salesman yet

That did not dream of a certain little cocked-hat

And feel it fit. McClellan felt that it fitted.

—After a year and a day, the auditors come,

Dry auditors, going over the books of the company,

Sad auditors, with groups of red and black figures

That are not moved by a dream of precious cocked hats.

And after the auditors go, the board of directors

Decides, with a sigh, to do without banner-salesmen—

It is safer to dream of a rusty Lincoln stovepipe.

That dream has more patience in it.

                                    And yet, years later,

Meeting the banner-salesman in some cheap street

With the faded clippings of old success in his pocket,

One cannot help feeling sorry for the cocked hat

So briefly worn in a dream of luck and the ego.

One cannot help feeling sorry for George McClellan,

He should have been a hero by every rule.

He looked the part—he could have acted the part

Word perfectly. He looked like an empire-maker.

But so few empire-makers have looked the part.

 

Fate has a way of picking unlikely material,

Greasy-haired second lieutenants of French artillery,

And bald-headed, dubious, Roman rake-politicians.

Her stiff hands were busy now with an odd piece of wood,

Sometime Westpointer, by accident more than choice,

Sometime brevet-captain in the old Fourth Infantry,

Mentioned in Mexican orders for gallant service

And, six years later, forced to resign from the Army

Without enough money to pay for a stateroom home.

Turned farmer on Hardscrabble Farm, turned bill-collector,

Turned clerk in the country-store that his brothers ran,

The eldest-born of the lot, but the family-failure,

Unloading frozen hides from a farmer’s sleigh

With stoop-shouldered strength, whittling beside the stove,

And now and then turning to whiskey to take the sting

From winter and certain memories.

                                 It didn’t take much.

A glass or two would thicken the dogged tongue

And flush the fair skin beneath the ragged brown beard.

Poor and shabby—old “Cap” Grant of Galena,

Who should have amounted to something but hadn’t so far

Though he worked hard and was honest.

                                  A middle-aged clerk,

A stumpy, mute man in a faded army overcoat,

Who wrote the War Department after Fort Sumter,

Offering them such service as he could give

And saying he thought that he was fit to command

As much as a regiment, but getting no answer.

So many letters come to a War Department,

One can hardly bother the clerks to answer them all—

Then a Volunteer colonel, drilling recruits with a stick,

A red bandanna instead of an officer’s sash;

A brigadier-general, one of thirty-seven,

Snubbed by Halleck and slighted by fussy Frémont;

And then the frozen February gale

Over Fort Henry and Fort Donelson,

The gunboats on the cold river—the brief siege—

“Unconditional surrender”—and the newspapers.

 

Major-General Grant, with his new twin-stars,

Who, oddly, cared so little for reading newspapers,

Though Jesse Grant wrote dozens of letters to them

Pointing out all the wonders his son had done

And wringing one dogged letter from that same son

That should have squelched anybody but Jesse Grant.

It did not squelch him. He was a business man,

And now Ulysses had astonished Galena

By turning out to be somebody after all;

Ulysses’ old father was going to see him respected

And, incidentally, try to wangle a contract

For army-harness and boom the family tannery.

It was a great surprise when Ulysses refused,

The boy was so stubborn about it.

                                 And everywhere

Were business-people, picking up contraband cotton,

Picking up army-contracts, picking up shoddy,

Picking up shoes and blankets, picking up wagons,

Businesslike robins, picking up juicy earthworms,

Picking up gold all over Tom-Tiddler’s Ground,

And Ulysses wouldn’t see it.

                          Few people have been

More purely Yankee, in essence, than Jesse Grant.

 

More pictures—Jefferson Davis, in dripping Spring rain,

Reading a chilly inauguration-address

To an unstirred crowd. He is really President now.

His eyes are more tired, his temper beginning to fray.

A British steamer in the Bahama Channel

Stopped by a Captain Wilkes and a Union cruiser.

They take two men, and let the steamer puff on

—And light a long hissing fuse that for a month

Nearly brings war with England. Lincoln and Seward

Stamp out the fuse, and let the Confederates go—

Wooden frigates at anchor in Hampton Roads

Burning and sinking with tattered banners apeak

Under the strange new, armadillo-bite

Of something plated with iron that yet can float,

The Merrimac—and all Washington and the North

In a twenty-four-hours’ panic—then, next day—

As Lincoln stares from the window of the White House

For the sooty sign in the sky that means defeat—

The armadillo, smoking back in her pride

To crunch up another meal of weak wooden ships,

Is beaten off by another leaky prodigy

A tin-can cylinder on a floating shingle,

The Monitor—the first fight of iron-clads,

The sinking of all the world’s old sea-bitten names,

Temeraire, Victory, and Constellation,

Serapis, Bon Homme Richard, Golden Hind,

Galleys of Antony, galleys of Carthage,

Galleons with gilded Virgins, galleasses,

Viking long-serpents, siren-haunted galliots,

Argos and argosies and the Achæan pride,

Moving to sea in one long wooden wall

Behind the huge ghost-flagship of the Ark

In such a swelling cloud of phantom sail

They whitened Ocean—going down by the head,

Green water seeping through the battened ports,

Spreading along the scrubbed and famous decks,

Going down—going down—going down—to mermaid-pools,

To Fiddler’s Green—to the dim barnacle-thrones,

Where Davy Jones drinks everlasting rum

With the sea-horses of his sunken dreams.

 

But this is Ellyat’s tune—and if the new

Army of the Potomac stands astrain

To end Secession with its “little Napoleon.”

If Lee is just about to find his hour;

If, among many mirrors and gilt chairs,

Under the flare of the gas-chandeliers

A sallow-faced and puffy Emperor

With waxed mustachios and a slick goatee

Gave various Southern accents, talking French,

Evasive answers and no definite help,

Ready enough to recognize the South

If he were sure of profit in the scheme

But not yet finding such a profit sure;

If in the foggy streets of Westminster,

The salty streets of Liverpool and Hull,

The same mole-struggle in the dark went on

Between Confederate and Unionist—

The Times raved at the North—Mr. Gladstone thought

England might recognize the South next year,

While Palmerston played such a tangled game

It is illegible yet—and Henry Adams

Added one more doubt to his education

By writing propaganda for the North,

It is all mist to Ellyat.

                        And when he sleeps,

He does not dream of Grant or Lee or Lincoln.

He only dreams that he is back at home

With a heroic wound that does not hurt,

A uniform that never stings with lice,

And a sword like Henry Fairfield’s to show Ellen Baker.

As far as the maps and the blocks on the maps have meaning

The situation is this.

                       A wide Western river,

A little lost landing, with a steamboat-store,

A post office where the roads from the landings meet,

A plank church three miles inland called Shiloh Chapel,

An undulating and broken table-land

Roughed into a triangle by bordering creeks.

Each side of the triangle runs about four miles long

And, scattered in camps from the tip of the triangle

To the base at the landing, are thirty-three thousand men,

Some fairly seasoned in war, but many green sticks,

Grant’s Army of the Tennessee.

                           Down the river

Don Carlos Buell has twenty-five thousand more

In the Army of the Ohio.

                      Opposing these

Are Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard

With something like forty thousand butternut fighters,

Including a martial bishop.

                          Johnston plans

To smash Grant’s army to bits, before Buell can join it,

And water his wagon-trains in the Tennessee.

He has sneaked his army along through wilderness roads

Till now they are only a mile and a half away

Tonight from the Union lines.

                           He is tall and active.

Light brown hair streaked with grey feathers, blue claymore eyes

That get steel shadows in battle, a face like Hamilton’s,

Old Westpointer, old cavalry-colonel, well-schooled in war.

Lincoln offered to make him a major-general

And rumor says that he could have had the command

Of the Union armies, once.

                          But he resigned

And later, went with his State. It is hard to say

What he might have been.

                         They called him the “preux chevalier”

At times, as they called and were to call many others

With that Waverley-streak that was so strong in the South.

They also called him one of Davis’s pets,

One of the tin Westpointers that Davis favored

Above good politicians and courtesy colonels.

The Richmond Enquirer didn’t think so much of him,

His soldiers thought rather more.

                                Only this can be said.

He caught Grant napping in some strange flaw of skill

Which happened once and did not happen again.

And drove his unprepared, unwatchful brigades

Back almost into the river.

                            And in the heat

Of seeing his lines go forward, he bled to death

From a wound that should not have been mortal.

                                                 After which,

While the broken Union stragglers under the bluff

Were still howling that they were beaten, Buell came up,

Lew Wallace came up, the knife half-sunk in the wound

Was not thrust home, the night fell, the battle lagged.

The bulldog got the bone in his teeth again

And next day, reinforced, beat Beauregard back

And counted a Union victory.

                            In the books

Both sides claim victory on one day or the other

And both claims seem valid enough.

                                   It only remains

To take the verdict of the various dead

In this somewhat indecisive meeting of blocks.

There were thirty-five hundred dead when the blocks had met.

But, being dead, their verdict is out of court.

They cannot puzzle the books with their testimony.

 

Now, though, it is only the evening before the day.

Johnston and Beauregard meet with their corps-commanders

By the wagon-cut Pittsburg road. The march has been slow.

The marching men have been noisy and hard to manage.

By every rule of war, Grant must have been warned

Long before now, and is planning an ambush for them.

They are being marched into an open Union trap.

So Beauregard thinks and says—and is perfectly right

According to rules. There is only one difficulty.

There is no ambush.

                     Sherman has just reported

The presence of enemy troops in front of his lines

But says he expects nothing more than some picket-firing

And Grant that evening telegraphs General Halleck,

“I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack.”

 

So much for the generals. Beauregard makes his point

And is overruled.

                   The April night comes down.

The butternut men try to get some sleep while they can.

They are to be up and fighting by five in the morning.

Jack Ellyat, least of any, expected attack.

He woke about five with a dazzle struck in his eyes

Where a long dawn-ray slid through a crack in the tent.

He cursed at the ray and tried to go back to sleep

But he couldn’t do it, although he was tired enough,

Something ate at his mind as soon as he wakened

And kept on eating.

                    This morning was Sunday morning.

The bells would be jangling for church back home, pretty soon,

The girls would be going to church in white Sunday dresses,

No, it was too early for that—they’d be muffled up

In coats and galoshes. Their cheeks would be pink as apples.

He wanted to see a girl who washed her hair,

Not a flat old woman sucking a yellow snuffstick

Or one of the girls in the dirty blue silk wrappers

With flags on their garters. He wanted to see a girl.

 

He wondered idly about the flags on the garters.

Did they change them to Rebel flags when the Rebels came?

Some poor whore down the river had had herself

Tattooed with a Secesh flag. She was patriotic.

She cried so hard when the Union troops were landed

That the madam had to hide her down in the cellar.

He must be bad to be thinking of things like that

On Sunday morning. He’d better go to church

If they had any kind of church, and make up for it—

O frosty churchbells jangling across the thin

Crust of packed frost, under Connecticut sky,

Put snow on my tongue, and the grey, cool flower of rain—

He had to get up. He couldn’t lie here and listen

To Bailey and the rest of them, snoring away.

His throat was dry. He needed a drink of water

But not from a muddy river—put rain on my tongue!

Souse me with chilly, sweet flaws of Puritan rain—

He started to put on his boots, looking over at Bailey.

Bailey was bearded, Bailey was thirty-two,

Bailey had been a teamster and was a corporal.

The waking Bailey looked like a stupid horse,

The sleeping Bailey looked like a dirty sack,

Bailey called him “Colonel” and didn’t mean it,

Bailey had had him tossed in a blanket once,

Bailey had told the tale of the tattooed whore,

Somehow he hated Bailey worse than the rest.

He managed to leave the tent without waking Bailey.

It was very early still. The sun was just up.

A fair sky, a very fair day. The air still held

That bloom which is not the bloom on apple or peach

But the bloom on a fruit made up of pure water and light,

The freshness of dawn, still trembling, being new-born.

He sucked at it gratefully.

                          The camp was asleep.

All that length of tents still asleep. He could see through the tents.

He could see all those sleeping, rough, lousy, detested men

Laden with sleep as with soft leaden burdens laden,

Movelessly lying between the brown fawns of sleep

Like infants nuzzled against the flanks of a doe,

In quietness slumbering, in a warm quietness,

While sleep looked at them with her fawn’s agate eyes

And would not wake them yet.

                            And he was alone,

And for a moment, could see this, and see them so

And, being free, stand alone, and so being free

To love or hate, do neither, but merely stand

Above them like sleep and see them with untouched eyes.

In a while they would wake, and he would hate them again.

But now he was sleep. He was the sun on the coat

Of the halted fawn at the green edge of the wood

Staring at morning.

                     He could not hate them yet.

 

Somebody near by, in the woods, took a heap of dry sticks,

And began to break them quickly, first one by one,

Then a dozen together, then hard-cracking axe-helves breaking.

Ellyat was running. His mouth felt stiff with loud words

Though he heard no sound from his mouth. He could see the white

Fine pine-splinters flying from those invisible axe-helves. . . .

 

For a minute all of them were tangled together

In the bucking tent like fish in a canvas scoop,

Then they were out of it somehow—falling in line—

Bailey’s hair looked angry and sleepy. The officers

Were yelling the usual things that officers yelled.

It was a surprise. They were going to be licked again.

It did not matter yet. It would matter soon.

Bailey had lost his blouse and his pants weren’t buttoned.

He meant to tell Bailey about it. There wasn’t time.

His eyes felt bald as glass but that was because

He kept looking for flying pine-splinters in the air.

Now they were setting off firecrackers under a boiler

And a man ran past with one hand dripping red paint,

Holding the hand with his other hand and talking

As if the hurt hand were a doll.

                                An officer hit him

With the flat of a sword. It spanked some dust from his coat

And the man’s face changed from a badly-fitting mask

Of terror, cut into ridges of sallow wax,

To something pink and annoyed, but he kept on running.

All this happened at once as they were moving.

The dawn had been hit to pieces with a hard mallet.

There were no fawns. There was an increasing noise

Through which he heard the lugubrious voice of Bailey

Singing off-key, like a hymn,

      “When I was a weaver, I lived by myself,

      And I worked at the weaver’s tra-a-de—”

 

The officers were barking like foxes now.

 

As the last tent dropped behind them, Ellyat saw

A red, puzzled face, looking out from under a tent-flap,

Like a bear from a cave. The face had been drunk last night,

And it stared at the end of the column with a huge and stupid wisdom.

“When I was a weaver, I lived by myself,

And I worked at the weaver’s trade—”

 

Jack Ellyat found himself back behind somebody’s tent

After a while. He had been out in the woods.

He remembered scrouging against a too-porous tree

For a day or a number of minutes while he jerked

A rattling ramrod up and down in a gun.

But they couldn’t stay in the woods—they had to come back.

They had called him “Bull Run Jack” but they had to come back,

Bailey and all the rest. He had come back with them,

But that was different—that was all right for him.

This red-colored clang of haste was different for him.

Bailey and all the rest could run where they liked.

He was an old soldier. He would stay here and fight.

Running, he tripped on a rope, and began to fall,

Bailey picked him back on his feet. “Did they get you, Bud?”

“No, they didn’t get me.”

                         Ellyat’s voice was a snarl.

What business had Bailey steadying him like that?

He hadn’t been running.

                     Suddenly he saw

Grey shouting strangers bursting into the tents

And his heart shrank up in a pea.

                                 “Oh hell,” he said,

Hopelessly ramming a cartridge. He was an old soldier.

He wasn’t going to run. He was going to act

Vast fictive heroisms in front of Bailey,

If they only gave him time, just a little time.

 

A huge horse rose above the wall of the tent

And hung there a second like a bad prodigy,

A frozen scream full of hoofs.

                            He struck at its head

And tried to get out from under as it lunged down

But he wasn’t quite quick enough.

                                   As he slipped and fell

He saw the laughter pasted on Bailey’s face

But before he could hear the laugh, the horse had fallen,

Jarring the world.

                  After blunt, sickly time

A fat young man with a little pink moustache

Was bawling “Hey, Yank, surrender!” into his ear

And nervously waving a pistol in front of his eyes.

He nodded weakly. “Hey, boys,” called the fat young man,

“I got two Yanks!” His mouth was childish with pleasure.

He was going to tell everybody he had two Yanks.

“Here, Yank, come and pull the horse off the other Yank.”

 

The prisoner’s column straggled along the road

All afternoon. Jack Ellyat marched in it numbly.

He was stiff and sore. They were going away from the battle

But they could still hear it, quaking,

The giant stones rolled over the grumbling bridge.

 

Some of the prisoners tried to joke with the guards,

Some walked in silence, some spoke out now and then,

As if to explain to the world why they were there.

One man said, “I got a sore heel.” Another said,

“All the same the Tenth Missouri’s a damn good regiment.”

Another said, “Listen, boys, don’t it beat all hell?

I left my tobacco behind me, back in the tent,

Don’t it beat all hell to lose your tobacco like that?”

 

Bailey kept humming the “Weaver,” but now and then

He broke it off, to say, with a queer satisfaction,

“Well, we surely did skedaddle—we surely did.”

Jack Ellyat had said nothing for a long time.

This was war, this was Phaëton, this was the bronze chariot

Rolling the sky. If he had a soul any more

It felt scrawny and thin as a sick turkey-poult.

It was not worth the trouble to fatten. He tried to fatten it

With various thoughts, now and then, but the thoughts were spoilt

Corn. They had damn well skedaddled. They damn well had.

That was all. The rest of the army could win or lose

They had surely skedaddled. They had been whipped again.

He had been whipped again.

                         He was no longer

The old soldier—no longer even “Bull Run Jack.”

He had lost a piece of himself. It had ragged edges

That piece. He could see it left behind in the tents

Under a dirty coat and a slab of tobacco.

 

After a while he knocked against Bailey’s arm.

“Where are we going?” he said, in a shy voice.

Bailey laughed, not badly, “Well, Colonel, Corinth I guess,

Corinth first—and then some damn prison-camp.”

He spat in the road. “It won’t be good grub,” he said.

“Bacon and hominy-grits. They don’t eat right.

They don’t eat nothing but bacon and hominy-grits.

God, I’m goin’ to get tired of bacon and hominy-grits!”

 

Ellyat looked. There was something different about him.

He stated a fact. “You’ve buttoned your pants,” he said.

“I remember you didn’t have ’em buttoned this morning.”

 

“That’s so,” said Bailey, impressed, “Now when did I button ’em?”

They chewed at the question, trying to puzzle it out.

It seemed very important to both for quite a long time.

It was night now. The column still marched. But Bailey and Ellyat

Had dropped to the rear of the column, planning escape.

There were few guards and the guards were as tired as they.

Two men could fall in a ditch by the side of the road

And get away, perhaps, if they picked a good time.

They talked it over in stupid whispers of weariness.

The next bend—no, the guard was coming along.

The next bend after—no, there was light for a moment

From a brief star, then clouded—the top of the hill—

The bottom of the hill—and they still were marching.

Rain began to fall, a drizzle at first, then faster.

Ellyat’s eyes were thick. He walked in a dream,

A heavy dream, cut from leaden foil with blunt shears.

Then Bailey touched him—he felt the tired bones of his skull

Click with a sudden spark—his feet stopped walking—

He held his breath for an instant,

And then wearily slumped in the ditch with enormous noise,

Hunching his shoulders against a phantom bayonet.

 

But when he could raise his head, the column had gone.

He felt fantastic. They couldn’t escape like this.

You had to escape like a drawing in Harper’s Weekly

With stiff little men on horses like sickle-pears

Firing round frozen cream-puffs into your back.

But they had escaped.

                      Life came back to him in a huge

Wave of burnt stars. He wanted to sing and yell.

He crackled out of the ditch and stood beside Bailey.

Had he ever hated Bailey? It could not have been.

He loved Bailey better than anything else in the world.

 

They moved slyly toward the woods, they were foxes escaped.

Wise foxes sliding away to a hidden earth

To a sandy floor, to the warm fawn-flanks of sweet sleep. . . .

And then an awful molasses-taffy voice

Behind them yelled “Halt!” and “Halt!” and—sudden explosion

Of desultory popcorn in iron poppers—

Wild running at random—a crash among broken boughs—

A fighting sound—Bailey’s voice, half-strangled but clear,

“Run like hell, Jack, they’ll never catch you!”

                                                He ran like hell.

 

Time passed like the rain. Time passed and was one with the rain.

Ellyat woke from a nightmare and put out his hand

To touch the wall by his bed, but there was no wall.

Then he listened for Bailey’s snoring.

                                     And he heard

The gorged, sweet pouring of water through infinite boughs,

The hiss of the big spilt drop on the beaten leaf,

The bird-voiced and innumerable rain,

A wet quail piping, a thousand soaked black flutes

Building a lonely castle of sliding tears,

Strange and half-cruel as a dryad’s bright grief.

 

Ellyat huddled closer under the tree,

Remembering what he could. He had run for years,

He had slept for years—and yet it was still not dawn.

It seemed cruel to him that it should never be dawn.

It seemed cruel that Bailey was lost. He had meant to show

Some fictive heroisms in front of Bailey.

He had not. Bailey had saved his skin instead,

And Bailey was lost. And in him something was lost,

Something worse than defeat or this rain—some piece of himself.

Some piece of courage.

                     Now the slant rain began

To creep through his sodden heart. He thought, with wild awe,

“This is Nibelung Hall. I am lying in Nibelung Hall.

I am long dead. I fell there out of the sky

In a wreck of horses, spilling the ball of the sun,

And they shut my eyes with stone runes and put me to sleep

On a bier where the living stream perpetually flows

Past Ygdrasil and waters the roots of the world.

I can hear the ravens scream from the cloudy roof.

I can hear the bubbles rising in the clear stream.

I can hear the old gods shout in the heathen sky

As the hawk-Valkyrie carry the stiffened lumps

Of corpse-faced heroes shriekingly to Valhalla.

This is Nibelung Hall. I must break the runes from my eyes.

I must escape it or die.”

                         He slept. The rain fell.

Melora Vilas, rising by candlelight,

Looked at herself in the bottom of the tin basin

And wished that she had a mirror.

                                Now Spring was here,

She could kneel above the well of a forest pool

And see the shadow hidden under the water,

The intent brown eyes, the small face cut like a heart.

She looked at the eyes and the eyes looked back at her,

But just when it seemed they could start to talk to each other—

“What are you like? Who are you?”—

                                 a ripple flawed

The deep glass and the shadow trembled away.

 

If she only had a mirror, maybe she’d know

Something, she didn’t know what, but something important,

Something like knowing your skin and you were alive

On a good day, something as drenched as sleep,

As wise as sleep, as piercing as the bee’s dagger.

But she’d never know it unless she could get a mirror

And they’d never get a mirror while they were hiders.

They were bound to be hiders as long as the war kept on.

Pop was that way. She remembered roads and places.

She was seventeen. She had seen a lot of places,

A lot of roads. Pop was always moving along.

Everybody she’d ever known was moving along.

—Dusty wagons full of chickens and children,

Full of tools and quilts, Rising Sun and Roses of Sharon,

Mahogany dressers out of Grandmother’s house,

Tin plates, cracked china, a couple of silver spoons,

Moving from State to State behind tired, scuffed horses

Because the land was always better elsewhere.

 

Next time they’d quit. Next stop they’d settle right down.

Next year they’d have time to rub up the mahogany dresser.

Next place, Mom could raise the flowers she wanted to raise.

But it never began. They were always moving along.

 

She liked Kansas best. She wished they’d go back to Kansas.

She liked the smell of the wind there.

But Pop hadn’t wanted to join with the Free-Soilers

And then the slavery men had shot up the town

And killed the best horse they had. That had settled Pop.

He said something about a plague on both of your houses

And moved along. So now they were hiders here

And whenever you wanted to ask Pop about the war

All he said was that same old thing about the plague.

She mustn’t call him Pop—that was movers’-talk.

She must call him Father, the way Mom, Mother wanted.

But it was hard to remember. Mom talked a lot

About old times back in the East and Grandmother’s house.

She couldn’t remember an East. The East wasn’t real.

There was only the dusty road and moving along.

Although she knew that Mom had worn a silk dress

And gone to a ball, once. There was a picture of Pop

And Mom, looking Eastern, in queer old Eastern clothes.

They weren’t white trash. She knew how to read and figure.

She’d read Macbeth and Beulah and Oliver Twist.

She liked Beulah best but Macbeth would have suited Pop.

Sometimes she wondered what had happened to them,

When Mother used to live in Grandmother’s house

And wear silk dresses, and Father used to read Latin—

When had they started to go just moving along,

And how would it feel to live in Grandmother’s house?

 

But it was so long ago, so hard to work out

And she liked it this way—she even liked being hiders.

It was exciting, especially when the guns

Coughed in the sky as they had all yesterday,

When Bent hid out in the woods to keep from recruiters,

And you knew there were armies stumbling all around you,

Big, blundering cows of armies, snuffling and tramping

The whole scuffed world with their muddy, lumbering hoofs,

Except the little lost brushpile where you were safe.

There were guns in the sky again today. Big armies.

An army must be fine to look at.

                                But Pop

Would never let her do it or understand.

An army or a mirror. She didn’t know

Which she’d rather find, but whenever she thought of it

The mirror generally won. You could keep a mirror yourself.

She had to call the hogs that afternoon.

You had to call them once or twice a month

And give them food or else they ran too wild

And never came for butchering in the Fall,

Though they lived well enough without your calling,

Fat in the forest, feeding on beech mast,

Wild muscadines and forest provender

That made their flesh taste sweet as hazelnuts.

 

She liked the hogs, they weren’t tame, sleepy hogs

Grunting in a black wallow, they were proud

Rapid and harsh and savage as Macbeth.

There was a young boar that she called Macbeth,

She’d seen him fight grey-bristled, drowsy Duncan

And drive him from the trough.

                              Fagin was there,

Bill Sikes was there and Beulah the black sow,

And Lady Macduff whose grunt was half a whine.

You could learn lots about a book from hogs.

She poured the swill and cupped her hands to call.

Sometimes they’d help her with it, Pop or Bent,

But Pop was off with Bent this afternoon

And Mom was always busy.

                        Slim and straight

She stood before the snake-rail pen that kept

Macbeths on their own proper side of the fence.

“Piggy,” she called, “Here, piggy, piggy, piggy!”

It wasn’t the proper call, but the hogs knew

That sweet clear loudness with its sleepy silver

Trembling against a chanter of white ash.

“Here, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy!

Here, piggy, piggy!” There was a scrambling noise

At the edge of the woods. “Here, piggy!”

                                        It was Banquo.

Greedy, but hesitant.

                      The Artful Dodger

Slim, black and wicked, had two feet in the trough

Before that obese indecision moved.

“Here, piggy! Here, piggy, piggy!”

                                    The gleaming call

Floated the air like a bright glassy bubble,

Far, far, with its clean silver and white ash.

And Ellyat, lost and desperate in the wood,

Heard it, desirous as the elvish blast

Wound on a tiny horn of magic grass

To witch steel riders into a green hill.

He stumbled toward its music.

                              “Piggy, piggy,

Here, piggy, piggy!”

                    The swine grunted and jostled.

Melora watched them, trying to count them up

With grave eyes, brown as nuts in rainwater.

They were all there, she thought—she must be sure.

She called again. No, something moved in the woods.

She stared past the clearing, puzzled. So Ellyat saw her

Beyond the swine, head lifted like a dark foal

That listens softly for strangeness.

                                    And she saw

An incoherent scarecrow in blue clothes

Stagger on wooden feet from the deep wood.

She called to him to keep away from the hogs,

Half-frightenedly.

                  He did not hear or obey.

He was out of Nibelung Hall.

                            She put one hand

On the rail of the fence to steady herself and waited.

“You can’t come in here,” she said, fiercely. “The hogs’ll kill you.”

But he was past the fed hogs and over the fence.

She saw a queer look on his face. “You’re hungry,” she said.

He grinned, made a noise in his throat, and fell, trying to touch her.

So Ellyat swam back to life, swam back to warmth

And the smell of cooking food. It was night. He heard

Impenetrable rain shake a low roof

And hiss stray, scattering drops on an open fire.

But he was safe. That rain was caged in the sky.

It could not fall on him.

                        He lay in a lax

Idleness, warm and hungry, not wanting to move.

A grub in a close cocoon neither bold nor wise, but content.

 

A tall woman was cooking mush in an iron pot.

The smell of the mush was beautiful, the shape of the pot

More beautiful than an urn by sea-nymphs carved

From sunken marbles stained with the cold sea-rose.

The woman was a great Norn, in her pot she cooked a new world,

Made of pure vapors and the juices of unspoilt light,

A new globe of sulliless amber and grains of white corn,

An orbed perfection. All life was beautiful now.

 

A girl came into the room upon light, quick feet.

He stared at her, solemnly. She was young and thin.

The small, just head was set on the slender neck

With a clean sureness. The heavy hair was a helm

Of bronze cooled under a ripple, marked by that flowing.

It was not slight but it could not weight her down.

Her hands and feet were well made and her body had

That effortless ease, that blood that flies with the bird.

She saw his open eyes and came over to him,

Not shyly but not concernedly.

                              Their eyes met.

The older woman kept stirring her melted world.

“Well,” said the girl, “You look better.” He nodded, “Yes.”

Their eyes said, “I have seen a new thing. In the deep cells

Below the paltry clockwork of the ticked heart,

I have seen something neither light nor night,

A new thing, a new picture. It may mean

The lifting of a shut latch. It may mean nothing.”

 

She made an escaping gesture with her right hand.

“You didn’t say who you were,” she said. “You just fell.

You better tell who you are, Pop’ll want to know.”

A shadow crossed her. “Pop won’t want to keep you,” she said.

“But I reckon we’ll have to keep you here for a piece,

You’re not fit to travel yet and that’s a fact.

You look a little bit like Young Seward,” she said

Reflectively, “But sometimes you look more like Oliver.

I dunno. What’s your name?”

                          Ellyat put forth his hand

Toward being alive again, slowly, hauling it down.

He remembered. He was Jack Ellyat. He had been lost.

He had lain with hel-shoes on in Nibelung Hall

For twenty years. This was the girl with the swine

Whose loud sweet calling had come to him in the wood

And lifted him back to warmth and a cooking world.

He had lost a piece of himself, a piece of life,

He must find it, but now—

                      “What’s your name?” he said in a whisper.

This is the hidden place that hiders know.

This is where hiders go.

Step softly, the snow that falls here is different snow,

The rain has a different sting.

Step softly, step like a cloud, step softly as the least

Whisper of air against the beating wing,

And let your eyes be sealed

With two blue muscadines

Stolen from secret vines,

Or you will never find in the lost field

The table spread, the signs of the hidden feast.

 

This is where hiders live.

This is the tentative

And outcast corner where hiders steal away

To bake their hedgehogs in a lump of clay,

To raise their crops and children wild and shy,

And let the world go by

In accidental marches of armed wrath

That stumble blindly past the buried path.

Step softly, step like a whisper, but do not speak

Or you will never see

The furriness curled within the hollow tree,

The shadow-dance upon the wilderness-creek.

 

This is the hiders’ house.

This is the ark of pine-and-willow-boughs.

This is the quiet place.

You may call now, but let your call be sweet

As clover-honey strained through silver sieves

And delicate as the dust upon the moth

Or you will never find your fugitives.

Call once, and call again,

Then, if the lifted strain

Has the true color and substance of the wild,

You may perceive, if you have lucky eyes,

Something that ran away from being wise

And changed silk ribbons for a greener cloth,

Some budding-horned and deer-milk-suckled child

Some lightness, moving toward you on light feet,

Some girl with indolent passion in her face.

Jack Ellyat wondered about things, six days later.

The world had come back to its shape. He was well and strong.

He had seen the old man with the burnt dreams in his eyes,

Who had fallen from something years ago in his youth

Or risen from something with an effort too stark;

The runaway who had broken the pasture-bars

To test the figments of life on a wild stone.

You could see the ultimate hardness of that strange stone

Cut in his face—but then, there was something else,

That came at moments and went, and answered no questions.

Had the feel of the stone been worth it, after all?

It puzzled Ellyat.

                  He couldn’t figure it out.

Going West to get fat acres was common enough,

But, once you got the acres, you settled down,

You sent your children to school. You put up a fence.

When a war came along, you fought on your proper side;

You didn’t blast both sides with Mercutio’s curse

And hide in a wilderness.

                          The man was all wrong,

And yet the man was not weak. It was very strange.

If the man had been weak, you could understand him all right.

 

The woman was more easy to understand.

He liked the woman—he liked the rough shaggy boy

Who had lived so much in the woods to keep from the armies

That his ears were sharp as a squirrel’s, and all his movements

Had something untamed about them, something leafy and strange.

Of course he ought to be fighting for the North,

He was really a skulk—but things were different here.

You couldn’t reason about the difference in words

But you felt it inside your skin.

                                  Things were different here.

Like Nibelung Hall in the rain of his fever-dream,

But with no terror, with an indolent peace.

 

He’d have to get back to the regiment pretty soon.

He couldn’t stay here. They none of them wanted him here.

He’d have to get back. But he didn’t know where to go.

They could tell him how to get back to Pittsburg Landing

But how did he know if the army was there or not?

He didn’t even know who’d won in the battle,

And, if the Rebs had won, he’d be captured again

As soon as he got on a road.

                            Well, he’d have to chance it.

He couldn’t stay here and fall in love with Melora.

Melora came walking down the crooked path

With a long shadow before her. It was the hour

When the heat is out of the gold of afternoon

And the cooled gold has not yet turned into grey,

The hour of the paused tide, neither flow nor ebb,

The flower beginning to close but not yet closed.

 

He saw her carry her fairy head aloft

Against that descending gold,

He saw the long shadow that her slight body made.

 

When she came near enough to him, she heard him humming

A tune he had thought forgotten, the weaver’s tune.

“And the only harm that I’ve ever done,

Was to love a pretty maid.”

 

She halted, trying to listen. He stopped the tune.

“What’s that you were singing?” she said.

                                          “Oh, just trash,” he said.

“I liked it. Sing it some more.”

                                But he would not sing it.

 

They regarded each other a foot or so apart.

Their shadows blotted together into one shadow.

 

She put her hand to both cheeks, and touched them lightly,

As if to cool them from something.

                                  A soft, smooth shock

Inexplicable as the birth of a star

And terrible as the last cry of the flesh

Ran through his cords and struck.

                                He stared at the shadows.

Then she took her shadow into the house with her

But he still stood looking where the shadows had touched.

John Vilas watched them go off through the wood

To get the water from the other spring,

The big pail clanking between them.

                                  His hard mouth

Was wry with an old nursery-rhyme, but his eyes

Looked somewhere beyond hardness.

                                  Let them go.

Harriet said and Harriet always said

And Harriet was right, but let them go.

Men who go looking for the wilderness-stone

And find it, should not marry or beget,

But, having done so, they must take the odds

As the odds are.

                Faustus and I are old.

We creep about among the hollow trees

Where the bright devils of our youth have gone

Like a dissolving magic, back to earth.

But in our tarnished and our antique wands

And in the rusty metal of our spells

There still remain such stubbornness and pith

As may express elixirs from a rock

Or pick a further quarrel with the gods

Should we find cause enough.

                            I know this girl,

This boy, this youth, this honey in the blood,

This kingly danger, this immediate fire.

I know what comes of it and how it lies

And how, long afterwards, at the split core

Of the prodigious and self-eaten lie,

A little grain of truth lies undissolved

By all the acids of philosophy.

Therefore, I will not seek a remedy

Against a sword but in the sword itself

Nor medicine life with anything but life.

I am too old to try the peddler’s tricks,

Too wise, too foolish, too long strayed in the wood,

The custom of the world is not my custom,

Nor its employments mine.

                          I know this girl

As well as if I never lay with her mother.

I know her heart touched with that wilderness-stone

That turns good money into heaps of leaves

And builds an outcast house of apple-twigs

Beside a stream that never had a name.

She will forget what I cannot forget,

And she may learn what I shall never learn,

But, while the wilderness-stone is strong in her,

I’d have her use it for a touchstone yet

And see the double face called good and bad

With her own eyes. So, if she stares it down,

She is released, and if it conquers her,

She was not weighted with a borrowed shield.

 

We are no chafferers, my daughter and I.

We give what pleases us and when we choose,

And, having given, we do not take back.

But once we shut our fists upon a star

It will take portents to unloose that grip

And even then the stuff will keep the print.

It is a habit of living.

                        For the boy

I do not know but will not stand between.

He has more toughness in him than he thinks.

—I took my wife out of a pretty house.

—I took my wife out of a pleasant place.

—I stripped my wife of comfortable things.

—I drove my wife to wander with the wind.

—And we are old now, Faustus.

                              Let it be so.

There was one man who might have understood,

Because he was half-oriole and half-fox,

Not Emerson, but the man by Walden Pond.

But he was given to the birds in youth

And never had a woman or a daughter.

The filled pail stood on a stone by the lip of the spring,

But they had forgotten the pail.

                                The spring was a cool

Wavering mirror that showed them their white, blurred faces

And made them wonder to see the faces so like

And yet so silent and distant.

                              Melora turned.

“We ought to go back,” she said in a commonplace voice.

“Not yet, Melora.”

                  Something, as from the spring

Rising, in silver smoke, in arras of silvers,

Drifting around them, pushed by a light, slow wind.

“Not yet Melora.”

                  They sat on a log above.

Melora’s eyes were still looking down at the spring.

Her knees were hunched in her arms.

                                    “You’ll be going,” she said,

Staring at the dimmed glass. “You’ll be going soon.”

The silver came closer, soaking into his body,

Soaking his flesh with bright, impalpable dust.

He could smell her hair. It smelt of leaves and the wind.

He could smell the untaken whiteness of her clean flesh,

The deep, implacable fragrance, fiercer than sleep,

Sweeter than long sleep in the sun.

                                    He touched her shoulder.

She let the hand stay but still she gazed at the spring.

Then, after a while, she turned.

                                The mirrored mouths

Fused in one mouth that trembled with the slow waters.

Melora, in the room she had to herself

Because they weren’t white-trash and used to be Eastern,

Let the rain of her hair fall down,

In a stream, in a flood, on the white birch of her body.

She was changed, then. She was not a girl any more.

She was the white heart of the birch,

Half hidden by a fleece that a South wind spun

Out of bronze air and light, on a wheel of light.

Her sharp clear breasts

Were two young victories in the hollow darkness

And when she stretched her hands above her head

And let the spun fleece ripple to her loins,

Her body glowed like deep springs under the sun.

 

She had no song to sing herself asleep

Tonight, but she would need no song to sing.

A thousand thoughts ran past her in a brief

Unhurrying minute, on small, quiet feet

But did not change her. Nothing could change her now.

—Black winter night against the windowpane

And she, a child, singing her fear to sleep

With nursery-rhymes and broken scraps of tunes.

How well she could remember those old songs.

But this night she would sleep without a song

Except the song the earth knows in the night

After the huge embrace of the bright day,

And that was better.

                    She thought to herself.

“I don’t know. I can’t think. I ought to be scared.

I ought to have lots of maybes. I can’t find them.

It’s funny. It’s different. It’s a big pair of hands

Pushing you somewhere—but you’ve got to go.

Maybe you’re crazy but you’ve got to go.

That’s why Mom went. I know about Mom now.

I know how she used to be. It’s pretty sweet.

It’s rhymes, it’s hurting, it’s feeling a bird’s heart

Beat in your hand, it’s children growing up,

It’s being cut to death with bits of light,

It’s wanting silver bullets in your heart,

It’s not so happy, but it’s pretty sweet,

I’ve got to go.”

                She passed her narrow hands

Over her body once, half-wonderingly.

 

“Divide this transitory and temporal flesh

Into twelve ears of red and yellow corn

And plant each ear beside a different stream.

Yet, in the summer, when the harvesters

Come with their carts, the grain shall change again

And turn into a woman’s body again

And walk across a heap of sickle-blades

To find the naked body of its love.”

 

She slipped her dress back on and stole downstairs.

The bare feet, whispering, made little sound.

A sleeper breathed, a child turned in its sleep.

She heard the tiny breathings. She shut the door.

 

The moon rode a high heaven streaked with cloud.

She watched it for a moment. Then she drank

That moon from its high heaven with her mouth

And felt the immaculate burning of that frost

Run from her fingers in such corporal silver

Her whole slight body was a corposant

Of hollow light and the cold sap of the moon.

 

She knew the dark grass cool beneath her feet.

She knew the opening of the stable door.

It shut behind her. She was in darkness now.

Jack Ellyat, lying in a warm nest of hay,

Stared at the sweet-smelling darkness with troubled eyes.

He was going tomorrow. He couldn’t skulk any more.

—Oh, reasonless thirst in the night, what can slake your thirst,

Reasonless heart, why will you not let me rest?

I have seen a woman wrapped in the grace of leaves,

I have kissed her mouth with my mouth, but I must go—

He was going back to find a piece of himself

That he had lost in a tent, in a red loud noise,

Under a sack of tobacco. Until he found it

He could never be whole again

                            —but the hunger creeps

Like a vine about me, crushing my narrow wisdom,

Crushing my thoughts—

                      He couldn’t stay with Melora.

He couldn’t take her back home. If he were Bailey

He would know what to do. He would follow the weaver’s tune.

He would keep Melora a night from the foggy dew

And then go off with the sunrise to tell the tale

Sometime for a campfire yarn. But he wasn’t Bailey.

He saw himself dead without ever having Melora

And he didn’t like it.

                      Maybe, after the war.

Maybe he could come back to the hider’s place,

Maybe—it is a long time till after the war

And this is now—you took a girl when you found her—

A girl with flags on her garters or a new girl—

It didn’t matter—it made a good campfire yarn—

It was men and women—Bailey—the weaver’s tune—

 

He heard something move and rustle in the close darkness

“What’s that?” he said. He got no answering voice

But he knew what it was. He saw a light-footed shadow

Come toward the nest where he lay. For a moment then

He felt weak, half-sickened almost.

                                    Then his heart began

To pound to a marching rhythm that was not harsh

Nor sweet, but enormous cadence.

                                “Melora,” he said.

His hand went out and touched the cup of her breast.

He wasn’t going away when he went to the wood.

He told himself that. They had broken the dime together.

They had cut the heart on the tree.

                                  The jack-knife cut

Two pinched half-circles of white on the green bark.

The tree-gum bled from the cuts in sticky, clear drops,

And there you were.

                    And shortly the bark would dry

Dead on the living wood and leave the white heart

All through the winter, all through the rain and snow,

A phantom-blaze to guide a tall phantom-hunter

Who came in lightness along a leaf-buried path.

All through the snowing winter it would be white.

It would take many springs to cover that white again.

What have I done in idleness, in sweet idleness,

What have I done to the forest?

                              I have marked

A tree to be my own with a jack-knife blade

In idleness, in sweet idleness. I have loosed

A dryad out of the tree to chain me with wild

Grapevines and forest trailers forever and ever

To the hider’s place, to the outcast house of the lost,

And now, when I would be free, I am free no more.

He thought of practical matters. There ought to be

A preacher and a gold ring and a wedding-dress,

Only how could there be?

                        He rolled hard words

Over his tongue. “A shotgun wedding,” he said.

It wasn’t like that, it never could be like that,

But there was a deadly likeness.

                              He saw the bored

Shamefaced seducer in the clean Sunday collar,

The whining, pregnant slut in the cheesecloth veil.

They weren’t like that—but the picture colored his mind.

 

If he only could go away without going away

And have everything turn out just as it ought to be

Without rings or hiding!

                        He told himself “I’m all right.

I’m not like Bailey. I wouldn’t sleep with a girl

Who never slept with anybody before

And then just go off and leave her.”

                                    But it was Melora.

It wasn’t seducing a girl. It was all mixed up.

All real where it ought to be something told in a sermon,

And all unreal when you had to do something about it,

His thoughts went round and round like rats in a cage,

But all he knew was—

                      he was sick for a room

And a red tablecloth with tasselled fringes,

Where a wife knitted on an end of a scarf,

A father read his paper through the same

Unchanging spectacles with the worn bows

And a young girl beneath a nickeled lamp

Soundlessly conjugated Latin verbs,

“Amo, amas, amat,” and still no sound—

 

Slight dryad, trailing the green, curled vines of the Spring,

I hate you for this moment, I hate your white breast

And idleness, sweet, hidden idleness—

He started awake. He had been walking through dreams.

How far had he come? He studied the sun and the trees.

Was he lost? No, there was the way.

                                   He turned back slowly,

To the dryad, the idleness—to the cheesecloth veil,

The incredible preacher, the falling out of life.

He’d ask her this evening where you could find such preachers.

The old man mustn’t know till the thing was done

Or he would turn to a father out of a cheap

Play, a cheap shotgun father with a wool beard

Roaring gilt rhetoric—and loading a musket.

He got the dry grins.

                     If the property-father shot him

Would they carve his name on the soldiers’ monument

After the war?

              There should be a special tablet.

“Here lies John Ellyat Junior, shot and killed

By an angry father for the great cause of Union.

‘How sleep the brave.’ ”

                      He stumbled and looked around him.

“Well, I might go on as far as the road,” he said.

 

A little while later he burst through the screen of brush.

And saw the highroad below him.

                              He wiped his face.

The road dipped down a hill to a little bridge.

He was safe enough now.

                        What was it Melora had said?

The highroad was six miles away from the farm,

Due west, and he could tell the west by the sun.

He must have covered a dozen, finding the road,

But getting back would be easy.

                                The sun was high.

He ought to be starting soon. But he lay down

And stared for a while at the road. It was good to see

A road in the open again, a dust-bitten road

Where people and horses went along to a town.

—Dryad, deep in the woods, your trails are small,

Winding and faint—they run between grass and flowers—

But it is good once more to come on a road

That is not drowsy with your idleness—

He looked down toward the bridge. There were moving blobs of dust

Crossing it—men on horses. His heart gave a strange

Throb of desire. What were they? They looked like soldiers.

Blue coats or grey? He could not tell for the dust.

He’d have to get back in the woods before they passed,

He was a hider now. But he kept on staring

A long two minutes, trying to make them out,

Till his eyes stung. One man had a yellow beard

And carried his rifle slung the Missouri way

But there were Missouri troops on either side.

In a minute he could tell—and wriggle away—

 

A round stick jabbed in his back.

                                 A slow voice said

“Reach for the sky, Yank, or I’ll nachully drill yuh.”

His hands flew up.

                 “Yuh’re the hell of a scout,” said the voice

With drawling scorn. “Yuh h’ain’t even got a gun.

I could have picked yuh off ten minutes ago,

Yuh made more noise than a bear, bustin thru’ that bresh.

What’d yuh ust to work at—wrappin’ up corsets?

Yeah—yuh kin turn around.”

                           Jack Ellyat turned

Incredulously.

                “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the boy

In butternut clothes with the wrinkled face of a leaf.

“Yuh’re a young ’un all right—aw, well, don’t take it so hard.

Our boys get captured, too. Hey, Billy!” he called,

“Got a Yankee scout.”

                     The horse-hoofs stopped in the road.

“Well, bring him along,” said a voice.

                                      Jack Ellyat slid

Down a little bank and stood in front of the horses.

He was dazed. This was not happening. But the horses

Were there, the butternut men on the horses were there.

 

A gaunt old man with a sour, dry mouth was talking,

“He’s no scout,” he said, “He’s one of their lousy spies.

Don’t he look like a spy? Let’s string him up to a tree.”

His eye roved, looking for a suitable branch,

His mouth seemed pleased.

                         Ellyat saw two little scooped dishes,

Hung on a balance, wavering in the air.

One was bright tin and carried his life and breath,

The other was black. They were balanced with dreadful evenness.

But now the black dish trembled, starting to fall.

 

“Hell, no,” said the boy with the face like a wrinkled leaf.

“He’s a scout all right. What makes yuh so savage, Ben?

Yuh’re always hankerin’ after a necktie-party.

Who captured the bugger anyhow?”

                                 “Oh, well,”

Said the other man. “Oh, well.” He spat in the dust.

“Anyhow,” he said, with a hungry look at Ellyat,

“He’s got good boots.”

                      The boy with the wrinkled face

Remarked that, as for the boots, no Arkansaw catfish

Was going to take them away from their lawful captor.

 

The rest sat their horses loosely and looked at him

With mild curiosity, ruminating tobacco.

Ellyat tried to think. He could not think.

                                    He was free,

These stuffless men on stuffless horses had freed him

From dryads and fathers, from cheesecloth veils and Melora.

He began to talk fast. He didn’t hear what he said.

“But I’ve got to get back,” he said. Then he stopped. They laughed.

“Oh, yuh’ll get over it, Bub,” said the wrinkled boy,

“It ain’t so bad. You won’t have to fight no more.

Maybe yuh’ll git exchanged. Git up on that horse.

No, take off them boots first, thanks.”

                                      He slung the boots

Around his neck. “Now I got some good boots,” he said.

And grinned at the gaunt man with the sour mouth.

“Now, Bub, I’ll just tie yuh a little with this yere rope

And then you won’t be bustin’ loose from the gang.

Grab the pommel as well as yuh kin.”

                                     The gaunt man coughed.

“I tell you,” he said, in a disappointed voice,

“If we just strung him up it’d make things a hull lot easier.

He’s a spy for sure, and everyone strings up spies.

We got a long piece to go yet and he’s a nuisance.”

 

“Aw, shut yore face,” said Jim Breckinridge in a drawl,

“Yuh kin hang any Yanks yuh ketch on a piece uh dishrag,

Yuh ain’t caught no armies yit.”

                                The gaunt man was silent.

Ellyat saw the little tin dish that carried the life

Slowly sink down, to safety, the black dish rise.

“Come on,” said Billy. The horses started to move,

Stirring a dust that rose for a little while

In a faint cloud. But after the horses had gone,

The cloud settled, the road went to sleep again.

Strike up, strike up for Wingate’s tune,

Strike up for Sally Dupré!

Strike up, strike up for the April moon,

And the rain on the lilac spray!

For Wingate Hall in its pride once more,

For the branch of myrtle over the door,

Because the men are back from the war;

For the clean bed waiting the dusty rider

And the punchbowl cooling for thirsty throttles,

For the hot cooks boiling the hams in cider

And Cudjo grinning at cobwebbed bottles—

The last of the wine, the last of the wine,

The last of the ’12 and the ’29!

Three times voyaged around the Cape

Till old Judge Brooke, with an oath oracular,

Pronounced it the living soul of the grape,

And the veriest dregs to be supernacular!

 

Old Judge Brooke with his double chins

Sighing over his hoarded claret

And sending the last of his cherished bins

To the hospital-doctors with “I can spare it

But if you give it to some damned layman

Who doesn’t know brandy from licorice-water

And sports a white ribbon, by fire and slaughter,

I’ll hang the lot of you higher than Haman!”

 

The Wingate cellars are nearly bare

But Miss Louisa is doing her hair

In the latest style of Napoleon’s court.

(A blockade-runner brought the report,

A blockade-runner carried the silk,

Heavy as bullion and white as milk,

That makes Amanda a gleaming moth.

For the coasts are staked with a Union net

But the dark fish slip through the meshes yet,

Shadows sliding without a light,

Through the dark of the moon, in the dead of night,

Carrying powder, carrying cloth,

Hoops for the belle and guns for the fighter,

Guncotton, opium, bombs and tea.

Fashionplates, quinine and history.

For Charleston’s corked with a Northern fleet

And the Bayou City lies at the feet

Of a damn-the-torpedoes commodore;

The net draws tighter and ever tighter,

But the fish dart past till the end of the war,

From Wilmington to the Rio Grande,

And the sandy Bahamas are Dixie Land

Where the crammed, black shadows start for the trip

That, once clean-run, will pay for the ship.

They are caught, they are sunk with all aboard.

They scrape through safely and praise the Lord,

Ready to start with the next jammed hold

To pull Death’s whiskers out in the cold,

The unrecorded skippers and mates

Whom even their legend expurgates,

The tough daredevils from twenty ports

Who thumbed their noses at floating forts

And gnawed through the bars of a giant’s cage

For a cause or a laugh or a living-wage,

Who five long years on a sea of night,

Pumped new blood to the vein bled white

—And, incidentally, made the money

For the strangely rich of the after years—

For the flies will come to the open honey,

And, should war and hell have the same dimensions,

Both have been paved with the best intentions

And both are as full of profiteers.)

 

The slaves in the quarters are buzzing and talking.

—All through the winter the ha’nts went walking,

Ha’nts the size of a horse or bigger,

Ghost-patrollers, scaring a nigger,

But now the winter’s over and broken,

And the sun shines out like a lovin’ token,

There’s goin’ to be mixin’s and mighty doin’s,

Chicken-fixin’s and barbecuin’s,

Old Marse Billy’s a-comin’ home!

He’s slewn a brigade with a ha’nts’s jaw-bone,

He’s slewn an army with one long sabre,

He’s scared old Linkum ’most to death,

Now he’s comin’ home to rest from he labor,

Play on he fiddle and catch he breath!

 

The little black children with velvet eyes

Tell each other tremendous lies.

They play at Manassas with guns of peeled

Willow-stalks from the River Field,

Chasing the Yanks into Kingdom Come

While one of them beats on a catskin drum.

They are happy because they don’t know why.

They scare themselves pretending to die,

But all through the scare, and before and after,

Their voices are rich with the ancient laughter,

The negro laughter, the blue-black rose,

The laughter that doesn’t end with the lips

But shakes the belly and curls the toes

And prickles the end of the fingertips.

 

Up through the garden, in through the door,

That undercurrent of laughter floats,

It mounts like a sea from floor to floor,

A dark sea, covering painted boats,

A warm sea, smelling of earth and grass,

It seeps through the back of the cheval-glass

Where Amanda stares at her stately self

Till her eyes are bright with a different spark,

It sifts like a dye, where Louise’s peering

In a shagreen-case for a garnet ear-ring

Till the little jewels shine in the dark,

It spills like a wave in the crowded kitchen

Where the last good sugar of Wingate Hall

Is frosting a cake like a Polar Highland

And fat Aunt Bess in her ice-wool shawl

Spends the hoarded knowledge her heart is rich in

On oceans of trifle and floating-island.

 

Fat Aunt Bess is older than Time

But her eyes still shine like a bright, new dime,

Though two generations have gone to rest

On the sleepy mountain of her breast.

Wingate children in Wingate Hall,

From the first weak cry in the bearing-bed

She has petted and punished them, one and all,

She has closed their eyes when they lay dead.

She raised Marse Billy when he was puny,

She cared for the Squire when he got loony,

Fed him and washed him and combed his head,

Nobody else would do instead.

The matriarch of the weak and the young,

The lazy crooning, comforting tongue.

She has had children of her own,

But the white-skinned ones are bone of her bone.

They may not be hers, but she is theirs,

And if the shares were unequal shares,

She does not know it, now she is old.

They will keep her out of the rain and cold.

And some were naughty, and some were good,

But she will be warm while they have wood,

Rule them and spoil them and play physician

With the vast, insensate force of tradition,

Half a nuisance and half a mother

And legally neither one nor the other,

Till at last they follow her to her grave,

The family-despot, and the slave.

 

—Curious blossom from bitter ground,

Master of masters who left you bound,

Who shall unravel the mingled strands

Or read the anomaly of your hands?

They have made you a shrine and a humorous fable,

But they kept you a slave while they were able,

And yet, there was something between the two

That you shared with them and they shared with you,

Brittle and dim, but a streak of gold,

A genuine kindness, unbought, unsold,

Graciousness founded on hopeless wrong

But queerly living and queerly strong. . . .

 

There were three stout pillars that held up all

The weight and tradition of Wingate Hall.

One was Cudjo and one was you

And the third was the mistress, Mary Lou.

Mary Lou Wingate, as slightly made

And as hard to break as a rapier-blade.

Bristol’s daughter and Wingate’s bride,

Never well since the last child died

But staring at pain with courteous eyes.

When the pain outwits it, the body dies,

Meanwhile the body bears the pain.

She loved her hands and they made her vain,

The tiny hands of her generation

That gathered the reins of the whole plantation;

The velvet sheathing the steel demurely

In the trained, light grip that holds so surely.

 

She was at work by candlelight,

She was at work in the dead of night,

Smoothing out troubles and healing schisms

And doctoring phthisics and rheumatisms,

Guiding the cooking and watching the baking,

The sewing, the soap-and-candle-making,

The brewing, the darning, the lady-daughters,

The births and deaths in the negro-quarters,

Seeing that Suke had some new, strong shoes

And Joe got a week in the calaboose,

While Dicey’s Jacob escaped a whipping

And the jellybag dripped with its proper dripping,

And the shirts and estrangements were neatly mended,

And all of the tasks that never ended.

Her manner was gracious but hardly fervent

And she seldom raised her voice to a servant.

She was often mistaken, not often blind,

And she knew the whole duty of womankind,

To take the burden and have the power

And seem like the well-protected flower,

To manage a dozen industries

With a casual gesture in scraps of ease,

To hate the sin and to love the sinner

And to see that the gentlemen got their dinner

Ready and plenty and piping-hot

Whether you wanted to eat or not.

And always, always, to have the charm

That makes the gentlemen take your arm

But never the bright, unseemly spell

That makes strange gentlemen love too well,

Once you were married and settled down

With a suitable gentleman of your own.

 

And when that happened, and you had bred

The requisite children, living and dead,

To pity the fool and comfort the weak

And always let the gentlemen speak

To succor your love from deep-struck roots

When gentlemen went to bed in their boots,

And manage a gentleman’s whole plantation

In the manner befitting your female station.

 

This was the creed that her mother taught her

And the creed that she taught to every daughter.

She knew her Bible—and how to flirt

With a swansdown fan and a brocade skirt.

For she trusted in God but she liked formalities

And the world and Heaven were both realities.

—In Heaven, of course, we should all be equal,

But, until we came to that golden sequel,

Gentility must keep to gentility

Where God and breeding had made things stable,

While the rest of the cosmos deserved civility

But dined in its boots at the second-table.

This view may be reckoned a trifle narrow,

But it had the driving force of an arrow,

And it helped Mary Lou to stand up straight,

For she was gentle, but she could hate

And she hated the North with the hate of Jael

When the dry hot hands went seeking the nail,

The terrible hate of women’s ire,

The smoky, the long-consuming fire.

The Yankees were devils, and she could pray,

For devils, no doubt, upon Judgment Day,

But now in the world, she would hate them still

And send the gentlemen out to kill.

 

The gentlemen killed and the gentlemen died,

But she was the South’s incarnate pride

That mended the broken gentlemen

And sent them out to the war again,

That kept the house with the men away

And baked the bricks where there was no clay,

Made courage from terror and bread from bran

And propped the South on a swansdown fan

Through four long years of ruin and stress,

The pride—and the deadly bitterness.

 

Let us look at her now, let us see her plain,

She will never be quite like this again.

Her house is rocking under the blast

And she hears it tremble, and still stands fast,

But this is the last, this is the last.

The last of the wine and the white corn meal,

The last high fiddle singing the reel,

The last of the silk with the Paris label,

The last blood-thoroughbred safe in the stable

—Yellow corn meal and a jackass colt,

A door that swings on a broken bolt,

Brittle old letters spotted with tears

And a wound that rankles for fifty years—

This is the last of Wingate Hall,

The last bright August before the Fall,

Death has been near, and Death has passed,

But this is the last, this is the last.

There will be hope, and a scratching pen,

There will be cooking for tired men,

The waiting for news with shut, hard fists,

And the blurred, strange names in the battle-lists,

The April sun and the April rain,

But never this day come back again.

 

But she is lucky, she does not see

The axe-blade sinking into the tree

Day after day, with a slow, sure stroke

Till it chops the mettle from Wingate oak.

The house is busy, the cups are filling

To welcome the gentlemen back from killing,

The hams are boiled and the chickens basting,

Fat Aunt Bess is smiling and tasting,

Cudjo’s napkin is superfine,

He knows how the gentlemen like their wine,

Amanda is ready, Louisa near her,

Glistering girls from a silver mirror,

Everyone talking, everyone scurrying,

Upstairs and downstairs, laughing and hurrying,

Everyone giving and none denying,

There is only living, there is no dying.

War is a place but it is not here,

The peace and the victory are too near.

One more battle, and Washington taken,

The Yankees mastered, the South unshaken,

Fiddlers again, and the pairing season,

The old-time rhyme and the old-time reason,

The grandchildren, and the growing older

Till at last you need a gentleman’s shoulder,

And the pain can stop, for the frayed threads sever,

But the house and the courtesy last forever.

 

So Wingate found it, riding at ease,

The cloud-edge lifting over the trees,

A white-sail glimmer beyond the rise,

A sugar-castle that strained the eyes,

Then mounting, mounting, the shining spectre

Risen at last from the drop of nectar,

The cloud expanding, the topsails swelling,

The doll’s house grown to a giant’s dwelling,

Porches and gardens and ells and wings

Linking together like puzzle-rings,

Till the parts dissolved in a steadfast whole,

And Wingate saw it, body and soul.

 

Saw it completely, and saw it gleam,

The full-rigged vessel, the sailing dream,

The brick and stone that were somehow quick

With a ghost not native to stone and brick,

The name held high and the gift passed on

From Wingate father to Wingate son,

No longer a house but a conjur-stone

That could hate and sorrow and hold its own

As long as the seed of Elspeth Mackay

Could mix its passion with Wingate clay

And the wind and the river had memories. . . .

 

Wingate saw it all—but with altered eyes.

He was not yet broken on any wheel,

He had no wound of the flesh to heal,

He had seen one battle, but he was still

The corn unground by the watermill,

He had ridden the rainy winter through

And he and Black Whistle were good as new,

The Black Horse Troop still carried its pride

And rode as the Yankees could not ride,

But, when he remembered a year-old dawn,

Something had come and something gone,

And even now, when he smelt the Spring,

And his heart was hot with his homecoming,

There was a whisper in his ear

That said what he did not wish to hear,

“This is the last, this is the last,

Hurry, hurry, this is the last,

Drink the wine before yours is spilled,

Kiss the sweetheart before you’re killed,

She will be loving, and she will grieve,

And wear your heart on her golden sleeve

And marry your friend when he gets his leave.

It does not matter that you are still

The corn unground by the watermill,

The stones grind till they get their will.

Pluck the flower that hands can pluck,

Touch the walls of your house for luck,

Eat of the fat and drink the sweet,

There is little savor in dead men’s meat.

It does not matter that you once knew

Future and past and a different you,

That went by when the wind first blew.

There is no future, there is no past,

There is only this hour and it goes fast,

Hurry, hurry, this is the last,

This is the last,

This is the last.”

 

He heard it and faced it and let it talk.

The tired horses dropped to a walk.

And then Black Whistle lunged at the bit

And whinnied because he was alive,

And he saw the porch where the evenings sit

And the tall magnolias shading the drive,

He heard the bell of his father’s mirth,

“Tallyho, Yanks—we’ve gone to earth!

Home, boy, home to Wingate Hall,

Home in spite of them, damn them all!”

He was stabbed by the rays of the setting sun,

He felt Black Whistle break to a run,

And then he was really there again,

Before he had time to think or check,

And a boy was holding his bridle-rein,

And Mary Lou’s arms were around his neck.

Sally Dupré and Wingate talk with the music. . . .

 

The dance. Such a lovely dance. But you dance so lightly.

Amanda dances so well. But you dance so lightly.

(Do you remember the other dance?)

Phil Ferrier was here, remember, last year.

(He danced with me. He could dance rather well. He is dead.)

We were all so sorry when we heard about Phil.

(How long will you live and be able to dance with me?)

Yes. Phil was a fine fellow. We all liked Phil.

(Do not talk of the dead.

At first we talk of the dead, we write of the dead,

We send their things to their people when we can find them,

We write letters to you about them, we say we liked him,

He fought well, he died bravely, here is his sword,

Here is his pistol, his letters, his photograph case;

You will like to have these things, they will do instead.

But the war goes on too long.

After a while you still want to talk of the dead.

But we are too tired. We will send you the pistol still,

The photograph-case, the knickknacks, if we can find them,

But the war has gone on too long.

We cannot talk to you still, as we used to, about the dead.)

Nancy Huguenot’s here tonight. Have you danced with her yet?

She didn’t want to come. She was brave to come.

(Phil Ferrier was Nancy’s lover.

She sent him off. She cut her hair for a keepsake.

They were going to be married as soon as he came back.

For a long time she dressed in black.

Then one morning she rose, and looked at the sun on the wall,

She put on a dress with red sleeves and a red, striped shawl,

She said “Phil was my beau. He wouldn’t have liked me in black.”

She used to cry quite a lot but she hasn’t cried much since then.

I think she’ll get well and marry somebody else.

I think she’s right. If I had to wear grief for a lover,

I wouldn’t wear black.

I would wear my best green silk and my Empire sacque

And walk in the garden at home and feel the wind

Blow through my rags of honor forever and ever.

And after that, when I married some other beau,

I would make a good wife and raise my children on sweet

Milk, not on poison, though it might have been so.

And my husband would never know

When he turned to me, when I kissed him, when we were kind,

When I cleaned his coat, when we talked about dresses and weather,

He had married something that belonged to the wind

And felt the blind

And always stream of that wind on her too-light bones,

Neither fast nor slow, but never checked or resigned,

Blowing through rags of honor forever and ever.)

 

They are calling for partners again. Shall we dance again?

(Why do we hate each other so well, when we

Are tied together by something that will not free us?

If I see you across a room, I will go to you,

If you see me across a room, you will come to me,

And yet we hate each other.)

 

Not yet, for a minute. I want to watch for a minute.

(I do not hate you. I love you. But you must take me.

I will not take your leavings nor you my pity.

I must break you first for a while and you must break me.

We are too strong to love the surrendered city.

So we hate each other.)

 

That’s a pretty girl over there. Beautiful hair.

(She is the porcelain you play at being.)

Yes, isn’t she. Her name is Lucy Weatherby.

(I hate her hair. I hate her porcelain air.)

She can’t be from the county or I’d remember her.

(I know that kind of mouth. Your mouth is not that.

Your mouth is generous and bitter and sweet.

If I kissed your mouth, I would have to be yours forever.

Her mouth is pretty. You could kiss it awhile.)

No, they’re kin to the Shepleys. Lucy comes from Virginia.

(I know that kind of mouth. I know that hair.

I know the dolls you like to take in your hands,

The dolls that all men like to take in their hands,

I will not fight with a doll for you or any one.)

 

We’d better dance now.

(Lucy Weatherby.

When this dance is done, I will leave you and dance with her.

I know that shallow but sufficient mouth.)

As you please.

(Lucy Weatherby.

I will make an image of you, a doll in wax.

I will pierce the little wax palms with silver bodkins.

No, I will not.)

That’s good music. It beats in your head.

(It beats in the head, it beats in the head,

It ties the heart with a scarlet thread,

This is the last,

This is the last,

Hurry, hurry, this is the last.

We dance on a floor of polished sleet,

But the little cracks are beginning to meet,

Under the play of our dancing feet.

I do not care. I am Wingate still.

The corn unground by the watermill.

And I am yours while the fiddles spill,

But my will has a knife to cut your will,

My birds will never come to your hill.

 

You are my foe and my only friend,

You are the steel I cannot bend,

You are the water at the world’s end.

 

But Wingate Hall must tumble down,

Tumble down, tumble down,

A dream dissolving, a ruined thing,

Before we can melt from the shattered crown

Gold enough for a wedding-ring.

And Wingate Hall must lie in the dust,

And the wood rot and the iron rust

And the vines grow over the broken bust,

Before we meet without hate or pride,

Before we talk as lover and bride,

Before the daggers of our offence

Have the color of innocence,

And nothing is said and all is said,

And we go looking for secret bread,

And lie together in the same bed.)

 

Yes, it’s good music, hear it lift.

(It is too mellow, it is too swift,

I am dancing alone in my naked shift,

I am dancing alone in the snowdrift.

You are my lover and you my life,

My peace and my unending strife

And the edge of the knife against my knife.

I will not make you a porcelain wife.

 

We are linked together for good and all,

For the still pool and the waterfall,

But you are married to Wingate Hall.

And Wingate Hall must tumble down,

Tumble down, tumble down,

Wingate Hall must tumble down,

An idol broken apart,

Before I sew on a wedding gown

And stitch my name in your heart.

And Wingate Hall must lie in the grass,

And the silk stain and the rabbits pass

And the sparrows wash in the gilded glass,

Before the fire of our anger smothers,

And our sorrows can laugh at their lucky brothers,

Before the knives of our enmity

Are buried under the same green tree

And nothing is vowed and all is vowed

And we have forgotten how to be proud,

And we sleep like cherubs in the same cloud.)

Lucy Weatherby, cuddled up in her bed,

Drifted along toward sleep with a smile on her mouth,

“I was pretty tonight,” she thought, “I was pretty tonight.

Blue’s my color—blue that matches my eyes.

I always ought to wear blue. I’m sorry for girls

Who can’t wear that sort of blue. Her name is Sally

But she’s too dark to wear the colors I can,

I’d like to give her my blue dress and see her wear it,

She’d look too gawky, poor thing.

                                  He danced with her

For a while at first but I hadn’t danced with him then,

He danced with me after that. He’s rather a dear.

I wonder how long he’ll be here. I think I like him.

I think I’m going to be pretty while I am here.

 

Lucy Weatherby—Lucy Shepley—Lucy Wingate—

Huger’s so jealous, nearly as jealous as Curly,

Poor Curly—I ought to answer his mother’s letter

But it’s so hard answering letters.”

                                    She cried a little,

Thinking of Curly. The tears were fluent and warm,

They did not sting in her eyes. They made her feel brave.

She could hardly remember Curly any more

But it was right to cry for him, now and then,

Slight tears at night and a long, warm, dreamless sleep

That left you looking pretty.

                              She dried the tears

And thought to herself with a pleasant little awe,

“You really are mighty brave, dear. You really are.

Nobody would think your beau was killed at Manassas.”

—She could hardly remember Curly any more—

She tried to make Curly’s face come out of the darkness

But it was too hard—the other faces kept coming—

Huger Shepley and all the Virginia boys

And now this new boy’s face with the dark, keen eyes.

 

Boys who were privates, boys who were majors and captains,

Nice old Generals who patted your shoulder,

Darling convalescents who called you an angel—

A whole, great lucky-bag of nice, thrilling boys,

Fighting for you—and the South and the Cause, of course.

You were a flame for the Cause. You sang songs about it.

You sent white feathers to boys who didn’t enlist

And bunches of flowers to boys who were suitably wounded.

You wouldn’t dream of making peace with the North

While a single boy was left to fight for the Cause

And they called you the Dixie Angel.

                                    They fought for the Cause

But you couldn’t help feeling, too, that they fought for you,

And when they died for you—and the Cause and the flag—

Your heart was tender enough. You were willing to say

You had been engaged to them, even when you hadn’t

And answer their mothers’ letters in a sweet way,

Though answering letters was hard.

                                She cuddled closer,

“Pillow, tell me I’m pretty, tell me I’m lovely,

Tell me I’m nicer than anybody you know,

Tell me that nice new boy is thinking about me,

Tell me that Sally girl couldn’t wear my blue,

Tell me the war won’t end till we’ve whipped the Yankees,

Tell me I’ll never get wrinkles and always have beaus.”

The slave got away from Zachary’s place that night.

He was a big fellow named Spade with one cropped ear.

He had splay feet and sometimes walked with a limp.

His back was scarred. He was black as a pine at night.

He’d tried to run away a couple of times

—That was how he got some of the marks you could tell him by—

But he’d been pretty quiet now for a year or so

And they thought he had settled down.

                                      When he got away

He meant to kill Zachary first but the signs weren’t right.

He talked to the knife but the knife didn’t sweat or heat,

So he just got away instead.

                            When he reached the woods

And was all alone, he was pretty scared for a while,

But he kept on going all night by the big soft stars,

Loping as fast as he could on his long splay feet

And when morning broke, he knew he was safe for a time.

 

He came out on a cleared place, then. He saw the red

Sun spill over the trees.

                          He threw his pack

Down on the ground and started to laugh and laugh,

“Spade, boy, Spade, you’s lucky to git dis far.

You never managed to git dis far before,

De Lawd’s sho’ly with you, Spade.”

                                He ate and drank.

He drew a circle for Zachary’s face in the ground

And spat in the circle. Then he thought of his woman.

“She’s sho’ly a grievin’ woman dis mawnin’, Spade.”

The thought made him sad at first, but he soon cheered up.

“She’ll do all right as soon as she’s thu with grievin’.

Grievin’ yaller gals always does all right.

Next time I’se gwine to git me a coal-black gal.

I’se tired of persimmon-skins.

                              I’se gwine to break loose.

De signs is right dis time. I’se gwine to be free,

Free in de Norf.”

                He saw himself in the North.

He had a stovepipe hat and a coal-black gal.

He had a white-folks’ house and a regular mule.

He worked for money and nobody ever owned him.

He got religion and dollars and lucky dice

And everybody he passed in the white folks’ street

Said “Good mawnin’, Mr. Spade—Mr. Spade, good mawnin’.”

He chuckled aloud. “Good mawnin’, Mistuh Spade,

Gwine to be free, Mistuh Spade—yes, suh, Mistuh Spade!”

For a lazy moment, he was already there—

Then he stiffened, nostrils flaring, at a slight sound.

It couldn’t be dogs already.

                            “Jesus,” he whispered,

“Sweet, lovin’ Jesus, don’t let ’em git me again,

Burn me up, but don’t let ’em git me again,

Dey’s gwine to cut me apart.”

                                The rabbit ran past.

He stared at it for a moment with wild, round eyes,

Started a yell of laughter—and choked it off.

“Dat ain’t no nachul rabbit dere, Spade, boy.

Dat’s a sign. Yes, suh. You better start makin’ tracks.

Take your foot in your hand, Mistuh Spade.”

                                        He swung the bundle

Up on his shoulders and slid along through the trees.

The bundle was light. He was going to be hungry soon

And the big splay feet would soon be bleeding and sore,

But, as he went, he shook with uncanny chuckles.

“Good mawnin’, Mr. Spade—glad to see you dis mawnin’

How’s Mrs. Spade, Mr. Spade?”

Sally Dupré, from the high porch of her house

Stared at the road.

                  They would be here soon enough.

She had waved a flag the last time they went away.

This time she would wave her hand or her handkerchief.

That was what women did. The column passed by

And the women waved, and it came back and they waved,

And, in between, if you loved, you lived by a dull

Clock of long minutes that passed like sunbonneted women

Each with the same dry face and the same set hands.

I have read, they have told me that love is a pretty god

With light wings stuck to his shoulders.

                                            They did not tell me

That love is nursing a hawk with yellow eyes,

That love is feeding your heart to the beak of the hawk

Because an old woman, gossiping, uttered a name.

They were coming now.

She remembered the first time.

They were different now. They rode with a different rein.

They rode all together. They knew where they were going.

They were famous now, but she wondered about the fame.

And yet, as she wondered, she felt the tears in her blood

Because they could ride so easily.

                                  He was there.

She fed her heart to the hawk and watched him ride.

 

She thought, “But they like this, too. They are like small boys

Going off to cook potatoes over a fire

Deep in the woods, where no women can ever come

To say how blackened and burnt the potatoes are

And how you could cook them better back in a house.

Oh, they like to come home. When they’re sick they like to come home,

They dream about home—they write you they want to come back,

And they come back and live in the house for a while

And raise their sons to hear the same whistle-tune

Under the window, the whistle calling the boys

Out to the burnt potatoes.

                          O whistler Death,

What have we done to you in a barren month,

In a sterile hour, that our lovers should die before us?”

Then she thought. “No, no, I can’t bear it. It cannot be borne.”

And knowing this, bore it.

                          He saw her. He turned his horse.

“If he comes here, I can’t keep it back, I can’t keep it back,

I can’t stand it, don’t let him come.” He was coming now.

He rides well, she thought, while her hands made each other cold.

I will have to remember how. And his face is sharper.

The moustache quite changes his face. The face that I saw

While he was away was clean-shaven and darker-eyed.

I must change that, now. I will have to remember that.

It is very important.

                      He swung from Black Whistle’s back.

His spurs made a noise on the porch. She twisted her hands.

“If I shut my eyes, I can make him kiss me. I will not.”

 

They were saying good-by, now. She heard polite voices saying it.

Then the voices ended. “No, no, it is not to be borne,

It is the last twist of the vise.”

                                  Her will snapped then.

When she looked at him, she knew that the knives were edgeless.

In an instant life would begin, life would be forever.

 

His eyes wavered. There was a thin noise in her ears,

A noise from the road.

                      The instant fell and lay dead

Between them like something broken.

 

She turned to see what had killed it.

 

Lucy Weatherby, reining a bright bay mare,

Played with the braided lash of a riding-whip

And talked to Wingate’s father with smiling eyes,

While Huger Shepley tried to put in a word

And the whole troop clustered about her.

                                        Her habit was black

But she had a knot of bright ribbons pinned at her breast,

Red and blue—the Confederate colors.

                                    They had cheered her.

They had cheered her, riding along with her colored ribbons.

It was that which had killed the instant.

                                        Sally looked

At the face with the new moustache she had to remember.

“Good-by,” she said. The face bent over her hand

And kissed it acceptably.

                        Then the face had gone.

He was back with the others now. She watched for a minute.

Lucy was unpinning her knot of ribbons.

She saw a dozen hands go up for the knot

And Lucy laugh her sweet laugh and shake her bright head,

Glance once at Huger Shepley and once at Clay,

And then toss the colored knot to the guidon-bearer

Who grinned and tied the ribbons around the staff

While some of them cheered again.

                                Then the horses moved.

They went by Lucy. Lucy was waving her hand.

She had tears in her eyes and was saying brave words to the soldiers.

Sally watched a back and a horse go out of sight.

She was tired, then.

When the troop had quite disappeared

Lucy rode up to the house.

                          The two women kissed

And talked for a while about riding-habits and war.

“I just naturally love every boy in the Black Horse Troop,

Don’t you, Sally darling? They’re all so nice and polite,

Quite like our Virginia boys, and the Major’s a dear,

And that nice little one with the guidon is perfectly sweet.

You ought to have heard what he said when I gave him the knot.

Though, of course, I can tell why you didn’t come down to the road,

War’s terrible, isn’t it? All those nice boys going off—

I feel just the way you do, darling—we just have to show them

Whenever we can that we know they are fighting for us,

Fighting for God and the South and the cause of the right—

‘Law, Chile, don’t you fret about whether you’s pretty or plain,

You just do what you kin, and the good Lawd’ll brighten your tracks.’

That’s what my old mammy would tell me when I was knee-high

And I always remember and just try to do what I can

For the boys and the wounded and—well, that’s it, isn’t it, dear?

We’ve all got to do what we can in this horrible war.”

Sally agreed that we had, and drank from a cup.

She thought. “Lucy Weatherby. Yes. I must look for a doll.

I must make a doll with your face, an image of wax.

I must call that doll by your name.”

Now the scene expands, we must look at the scene as a whole.

How are the gameboards chalked and the pieces set?

There is an Eastern game and a Western game.

In the West, blue armies try to strangle the long

Snake of the Mississippi with iron claws;

Buell and Grant against Bragg and Beauregard.

They have hold of the head of the snake where it touches the Gulf,

New Orleans is taken, the fangs of the forts drawn out,

The ambiguous Butler wins ambiguous fame

By issuing orders stating that any lady

Who insults a Union soldier in uniform

Shall be treated as a streetwalker plying her trade.

The orders are read and hated. The insults stop

But the ladies remember Butler for fifty years

And make a fabulous devil with pasteboard horns

—“Beast” Butler, the fiend who pilfered the silver spoons—

From a slightly-tarnished, crude-minded, vain politician

Who loved his wife and ached to be a great man.

You were not wise with the ladies, Benjamin Butler,

It has been disproved that you stole New Orleans spoons

But the story will chime at the ribs of your name and stain it,

Ghost-silver, clinking against the ribs of a ghost,

As long as the ladies have tongues.

                                    Napoleon was wiser

But he could not silence one ugly, clever De Staël.

Make war on the men—the ladies have too-long memories.

 

The head of the snake is captured—the tail gripped fast—

But the body in between still writhes and resists,

Vicksburg is still unfallen—Grant not yet master—

Sheridan, Sherman, Thomas still in the shadow.

The eyes of the captains are fixed on the Eastern game,

The presidents—and the watchers oversea—

For there are the two defended kings of the board,

Muddy Washington, with its still-unfinished Capitol,

Sprawling, badly-paved, beset with sharp hogs

That come to the very doorsteps and grunt for crumbs,

Full of soldiers and clerks, full of all the baggage of war,

“Bombproof” officers, veterans back on leave,

Recruits, spies, spies on the spies, politicians, contractors,

Reporters, slackers, ambassadors, bands and harlots,

Negro-boys who organize butting-matches

To please the recruits, tattooers and fortune-tellers,

Rich man, poor man, soldier, beggarman, thief,

And one most lonely man in a drafty White House

Whose everlasting melancholy runs

Like a deep stream under the funny stories,

The parable-maker, humble in many things

But seldom humble with his fortitude,

The sorrowful man who cracked the sure-fire jokes,

Roared over Artemus Ward and Orpheus C. Kerr

And drove his six cross mules with a stubborn hand.

He has lost a son, but he has no time to grieve for him.

He studies tactics now till late in the night

With the same painful, hewing industry

He put on studying law.

                      McClellan comes,

McClellan goes, McClellan bustles and argues,

McClellan is too busy to see the President,

McClellan complains of this, complains of that,

The Government is not supporting him,

The Government cannot understand grand strategy,

The Government—

                McClellan feels abused.

McClellan is quite sincere and sometimes right.

They come to the lonely man about McClellan

With various tales.

                  McClellan lacks respect,

McClellan dreams about a dictatorship,

McClellan does that and this.

                              The lonely man

Listens to all the stories and remarks,

“If McClellan wins, I will gladly hold his horse.”

 

A hundred miles away in an arrow-line

Lies the other defended king of the giant chess,

Broad-streeted Richmond.

                        All the baggage of war

Is here as well, the politicians, the troops,

The editors who scream at the government,

The slackers, the good and the bad, but the flavor is different:

There is something older here, and smaller and courtlier,

The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people,

Family-trees that remember your grandfather’s name.

It is still a clan-city, a family-city, a city

That thinks of the war, on the whole, as a family-matter,

A woman city, devoted and fiercely jealous

As any of the swan-women who ruled it then—

Ready to give their lives and hearts for the South,

But already a little galled by Jefferson Davis

And finding him rather too much of a doctrinaire

With a certain comparative touch of the parvenu.

He is not from Virginia, we never knew his grandfather.

 

The South is its husband, the South is not quite its master.

It has a soul while Washington is a symbol,

Beautiful, witty, feminine, narrow and valiant,

Unwisely-chosen, perhaps, for a king of the game,

But playing the part with a definite air of royalty

Until, in the end, it stands for the South completely

And when it falls, the sword of the South snaps short.

 

At present, the war has not yet touched it home.

McClellan has landed, on the Peninsula,

But his guns are still far away.

                                  The ladies go

To Mrs. Davis’s parties in last year’s dresses.

Soon they are to cut the green and white chintz curtains

That shade their long drawing-rooms from the lazy sun

To bandage the stricken wounded of Seven Pines.

 

The lonely man with the chin like John Calhoun’s

Works hard and is ill at ease in his Richmond White House.

His health was never too strong—it is tiring now

Under a mass of detail, under the strain

Of needless quarrels with secretaries and chiefs

And a Congress already beginning to criticize him.

He puts his trust in God with a charmed devotion

And his faith, too often, in men who can feed his vanity.

They mock him for it. He cannot understand mocking.

There is something in him that prickles the pride of men

Whom Lincoln could have used, and makes them his foes.

Joe Johnston and he have been at odds from the first,

Beauregard and he are at odds and will be at odds,

One could go through a list—

                              He is quite as stubborn as Lincoln

In supporting the people he trusts through thick and thin,

But—except for Lee—the people he trusts so far

Seldom do the work that alone can repay the trust.

They fail in the end and his shoulders carry the failure,

And leave him, in spite of his wife, in spite of his God,

Lonely, beginning and end, with that other’s loneliness.

The other man could have understood him and used him.

He could never have used or comprehended the other.

It is their measure.

                    And yet, a deep loneliness,

A deep devotion, a deep self-sacrifice,

Binds the strange two together.

                                He, too, is to lose

A child in his White House, ere his term is accomplished.

He, too, is to be the scapegoat for all defeat.

And he is to know the ultimate bitterness,

The cause lost after every expense of mind,

And bear himself with decent fortitude

In the prison where the other would not have kept him.

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales

Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

The other man’s tragedy was the greater one

Since the blind fury tore the huger heart,

But this man’s tragedy is the more pitiful.

Thus the Eastern board and the two defended kings.

But why is the game so ordered, what crowns the kings?

They are cities of streets and houses like other cities.

Baltimore might be taken, and war go on,

Atlanta will be taken and war go on,

Why should these two near cities be otherwise?

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make.

A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound,

But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound,

Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones,

So with these cities.

                      And so the third game is played,

The intricate game of the watchers oversea,

The shadow that falls like the shadow of a hawk’s wing

Over the double-chessboard until the end—

The shadow of Europe, the shadows of England and France,

The war of the cotton against the iron and wheat.

The shadows ponder and mutter, biding their time;

If the knights and bishops that play for the cotton-king

Can take the capital-city of wheat and iron,

The shadow-hands will turn into hands of steel

And intervene for the cotton that feeds the mills.

But if the fable throned on a cotton-bale

Is checkmated by the pawns of iron and wheat,

The shadows will pause, and cleave to iron and wheat,

They will go their ways and lift their eyes from the game,

For iron and wheat are not to be lightly held.

So the watchers, searching the board.

                                And so the game.

The blockade grips, the blockade-runners break through,

There are duels and valors, the Western game goes on

And the snake of the Mississippi is tamed at last,

But the fight in the East is the fight between the two kings.

If Richmond is threatened, we threaten Washington,

You check our king with McClellan or Hooker or Grant,

We will check your king with Jackson or Early or Lee

And you must draw back strong pieces to shield your king,

For we hold the chord of the circle and you the arc

And we can shift our pieces better than you.

 

So it runs for years until Jubal Early, riding,

A long twelve months after Gettysburg’s high tide,

Sees the steeples of Washington prick the blue June sky

And the Northern king is threatened for the last time.

But, by then, the end is too near, the cotton is withered.

Now the game still hangs in the balance—the cotton in bloom—

The shadows of the watchers long on the board.

McClellan has moved his men from their camps at last

In a great sally.

                There are many gates he can try.

The Valley gate and the old Manassas way,

But he has chosen to ferry his men by sea,

To the ragged half-island between the York and the James

And thrust up a long, slant arm from Fortress Monroe

Northwest toward Richmond.

                            The roads are sticky and soft,

There are forts at Yorktown and unmapped rivers to cross.

He has many more men than Johnston or John Magruder

But the country hinders him, and he hinders himself

By always thinking the odds on the other side

And that witches of ruin haunt each move he makes.

But even so—he has boarded that jutting deck

That is the Peninsula, and his forces creep

Slowly toward Richmond, slowly up to the high

Defended captain’s cabin of the great ship.

—There was another force that came from its ships

To take a city set on a deck of land,

The cause unlike, but the fighting no more stark,

The doom no fiercer, the fame no harder to win.

There are no gods to come with a golden smoke

Here in the mud between the York and the James

And wrap some high-chinned hero away from death.

There are only Bibles and buckles and cartridge belts

That sometimes stop a bullet before it kills

But oftener let it pass.

                        And when Sarpedon

Falls and the heavy darkness stiffens his limbs

They will let him lie where he fell, they will not wash him

In the running streams of Scamander, the half-divine,

They will bury him in a shallow and cumbered pit.

But, if you would sing of fighters, sing of these men,

Sing of Fair Oaks and the battered Seven Days,

Not of the raging of Ajax, the cry of Hector,

These men were not gods nor shielded by any gods,

They were men of our shape: they fought as such men may fight

With a mortal skill: when they died it was as men die.

 

Army of the Potomac, advancing army,

Alloy of a dozen disparate, alien States,

City-boy, farm-hand, bounty-man, first volunteer,

Old regular, drafted recruit, paid substitute,

Men who fought through the war from First Bull Run,

And other men, nowise different in look or purpose,

Whom the first men greeted at first with a ribald cry

“Here they come! Two hundred dollars and a ka-ow!”

Rocks from New England and hickory-chunks from the West,

Bowery boy and clogging Irish adventurer,

Germans who learnt their English under the shells

Or didn’t have time to learn it before they died.

Confused, huge weapon, forged from such different metals,

Misused by unlucky swordsmen till you were blunt

And then reforged with anguish and bloody sweat

To be blunted again by one more unlucky captain

Against the millstone of Lee.

                            Good stallion,

Ridden and ridden against a hurdle of thorns

By uncertain rider after uncertain rider.

The rider fails and you shiver and catch your breath,

They plaster your wounds and patch up your broken knees,

And then, just as you know the grip of your rider’s hands

And begin to feel at home with his horseman’s tricks,

Another rider comes with a different seat,

And lunges you at the bitter hurdle again,

And it beats you again—and it all begins from the first,

The patching of wounds, the freezing in winter camps,

The vain mud-marches, the diarrhea, the wastage,

The grand reviews, the talk in the newspapers,

The sour knowledge that you were wasted again,

Not as Napoleons waste for a victory

But blindly, unluckily—

                        until at last

After long years, at fish-hook Gettysburg,

The blade and the millstone meet and the blade holds fast.

And, after that, the chunky man from the West,

Stranger to you, not one of the men you loved

As you loved McClellan, a rider with a hard bit,

Takes you and uses you as you could be used,

Wasting you grimly but breaking the hurdle down.

You are never to worship him as you did McClellan,

But at the last you can trust him. He slaughters you

But he sees that you are fed. After sullen Cold Harbor

They call him a butcher and want him out of the saddle,

But you have had other butchers who did not win

And this man wins in the end.

                            You see him standing,

Reading a map, unperturbed, under heavy fire.

You do not cheer him as the recruits might cheer

But you say “Ulysses doesn’t scare worth a darn.

Ulysses is all right. He can finish the job.”

And at last your long lines go past in the Grand Review

And your legend and his begins and are mixed forever.

 

Now, though, he is still just one of the Western leaders,

And Little Mac is your darling.

                                You are unshaken

By the ruin of Fredericksburg, the wounds of Antietam,

Chancellorsville is a name in the Wilderness,

Your pickets, posted in front of the Chickahominy,

Hear the churchbells of Richmond, ringing;

Listen well to those bells, they are very near tonight,

But you will not hear them again for three harsh years.

 

Black months of war, hard-featured, defeated months

Between Fair Oaks and Gettysburg,

What is your tale for this army?

What do the men,

So differently gathered for your word to devour,

Say to your ears, deaf with cannon? What do they bring

In powder-pocked hands to the heart of the burst shell?

Let us read old letters awhile,

Let us try to hear

The thin, forgotten voices of men forgotten

Crying out of torn scraps of paper, notes scribbled and smudged

On aces, on envelope-backs, on gilt-edged cards stolen out of a dead man’s haversack.

 

—Two brothers lay on the field of Fredericksburg

After the assault had failed.

They were unwounded but they could not move,

The sharpshooters covered that patch of ground too well.

They had a breastwork to hide them from the bullets,

A shelter of two dead men. One had lost his back,

Scooped out from waist to neck with a solid shot.

The other’s legs were gone. They made a good breastwork.

The brothers lay behind them, flat in the mud,

All Sunday till night came down and they could creep off.

They did not dare move their hands for fourteen hours.

—A middle-aged person named Fletcher from Winchester

Enlisted in the Massachusetts Sharpshooters.

He was a crack-duckshooter, skilful and patient.

They gave him the wrong sort of rifle and twenty rounds

And told him to join his company.

It took him days to find it. He had no rations,

He begged bread and green corn and peaches and shot a hog;

So got there at last. He joined just before Antietam.

He’d never been drilled but he knew how to shoot,

Though at first his hands kept shaking.

“It was different kind of gunning from what I was used to,

I was mad with myself that I acted so like a coward.”

But as soon as they let him lie down and fight on his own,

He felt all right. He had nineteen cartridges now.

The first five each killed a man—he was a good shot—

Then the rifle fouled. He began to get up and fix it,

Mechanically. A bullet went through his lung.

He lay on the field all day. At the end of the day

He was captured, sent to prison, paroled after weeks,

Died later, because of the wound.

That was his war—

Other voices, rising out of the scraps of paper,

Till they mix in a single voice that says over and over

“It is cold. It is wet. We marched till we couldn’t stand up.

It is muddy here. I wish you could see us here.

I wish everybody at home could see us here.

They would know what war is like. We are still patriotic.

We are going to fight. We hope this general’s good.

We hope he can make us win. We’ll do all we can.

But I wish we could show everybody who stays at home

What this is like.”

Voices of tired men,

Sick, convalescent, afraid of being sick.

“The diarrhea is bad. I hope I don’t get it

But everybody seems to get it sometime.

I felt sick last night. I thought I was going to die,

But Jim rubbed me and I feel better. There’s just one thing,

I hope I never get sent to the hospital,

You don’t get well when you go to the hospital.

I’d rather be shot and killed quick.”

(Nurses and doctors, savagely, tenderly working,

Trying to beat off death without enough knowledge,

Trying and failing.

Clara Barton, Old Mother Bickerdyke,

Overworked evangels of common sense,

Nursing, tending, clearing a ruthless path

Through the cant and red tape, through the petty jealousies

To the bitter front, bringing up the precious supplies

In spite of hell and high water and pompous fools,

To the deadly place where the surgeons’ hands grew stiff

Under the load of anguish they had to deal,

Where they bound men’s wounds and swabbed them with green corn leaves,

There being no other lint.

Whitman, with his sack of tobacco and comfits,

Passing along the terrible, crowded wards,

Listening, writing letters, trying to breathe

Strong life into lead-colored lips.

He does what he can. The doctors do what they can.

The nurses save a life here and another there,

But the sick men die like flies in the hospitals.)

Voices of boys and men,

Homesick, stubborn, talking of little things,

“We get better food. I’m getting to be a good cook.

The food’s bad. The whole company yelled ‘Hard Bread!’ today.

There are only three professed Christians in my whole regiment,

I feel sad about that.

I wish you could see the way we have to live here,

I wish everybody at home could see what it’s like.

It’s muddy. It’s cold. My shoes gave out on the march.

We lost the battle. The general was drunk.

This is the roughest life that you ever saw.

If I ever get back home—”

And, over and over, in stiff, patriotic phrases,

“I am resigned to die for the Union, mother.

If we die in this battle, we will have died for the right,

We will have died bravely—you can trust us for that.

It is only right to die for our noble Union.

We will save it or die for it. There’s just one thing.

I hope I die quick. I hope I don’t have to die

In the hospital.

There is one thought that to me is worse than death.

(This, they say over and over) it is the thought

Of being buried as they bury us here

After a battle. Sometimes they barely cover us.

I feel sick when I think of getting buried like that,

Though if nothing except our death will rescue our Union,

You can trust us to die for it.”

And, through it all, the deep diapason swelling,

“It is cold. We are hungry. We marched all day in the mud.

We could barely stand when we got back into camp.

Don’t believe a thing the newspapers say about us.

It’s all damn lies.

                  We are willing to die for our Union,

But I wish you could all of you see what this is like,

Nobody at home can imagine what it is like.

We are ready to fight. We know we can fight and win.

But why will they waste us in fights that cannot be won?

When will we get a man that can really lead us?”

These are the articulate that write the letters.

The inarticulate merely undergo.

There are times of good food and times of campfire jokes,

Times of good weather, times of partial success

In those two years.

                  “The mail came. Thanks for the papers.

We had a good feed at Mrs. Wilson’s place.

I feel fine today. We put on a show last night.

You ought to have seen Jim Wheeler in ‘Box and Cox.’

Our little band of Christians meets often now

And the spirit moves in us strongly, praise be to God.

The President reviewed us two days ago.

You should have seen it, father, it was majestic.

I have never seen a more magnificent sight.

It makes me proud to be part of such an army.

We got the tobacco. The socks came. I’m feeling fine.”

All that—but still the deep diapason throbs

Under the rest.

                The cold. The mud. The bleak wonder.

The weakening sickness—the weevils tainting the bread—

We were beaten again in spite of all we could do.

We don’t know what went wrong but something went wrong.

When will we find a man who can really lead us?

When will we not be wasted without success?

 

Army of the Potomac, army of brave men,

Beaten again and again but never quite broken,

You are to have the victory in the end

But these bleak months are your anguish.

                                      Your voice dies out.

Let us hear the voice of your steadfast enemy.

 

Army of Northern Virginia, fabulous army,

Strange army of ragged individualists,

The hunters, the riders, the walkers, the savage pastorals,

The unmachined, the men come out of the ground,

Still for the most part, living close to the ground

As the roots of the cow-pea, the roots of the jessamine,

The lazy scorners, the rebels against the wheels,

The rebels against the steel combustion-chamber

Of the half-born new age of engines and metal hands.

The fighters who fought for themselves in the old clan-fashion.

Army of planters’ sons and rusty poor-whites,

Where one man came to war with a haircloth trunk

Full of fine shirts and a body-servant to mend them,

And another came with a rifle used at King’s Mountain

And nothing else but his pants and his sun-cracked hands,

Aristo-democracy armed with a forlorn hope,

Where a scholar turned the leaves of an Arabic grammar

By the campfire-glow, and a drawling mountaineer

Told dirty stories old as the bawdy world,

Where one of Lee’s sons worked a gun with the Rockbridge Battery

And two were cavalry generals.

                              Praying army,

Full of revivals, as full of salty jests,

Who debated on God and Darwin and Victor Hugo,

Decided that evolution might do for Yankees

But that Lee never came from anything with a tail,

And called yourselves “Lee’s miserables faintin’ ”

When the book came out that tickled your sense of romance,

Army of improvisators of peanut-coffee

Who baked your bread on a ramrod stuck through the dough,

Swore and laughed and despaired and sang “Lorena,”

Suffered, died, deserted, fought to the end.

Sentimental army, touched by “Lorena,”

Touched by all lace-paper-valentines of sentiment,

Who wept for the mocking-bird on Hallie’s grave

When you had better cause to weep for more private griefs,

Touched by women and your tradition-idea of them,

The old, book-fed, half-queen, half-servant idea,

False and true and expiring.

                          Starving army,

Who, after your best was spent and your Spring lay dead,

Yet held the intolerable lines of Petersburg

With deadly courage.

                    You too are a legend now

And the legend has made your fame and has dimmed that fame,

—The victor strikes and the beaten man goes down

But the years pass and the legend covers them both,

The beaten cause turns into the magic cause,

The victor has his victory for his pains—

So with you—and the legend has made a stainless host

Out of the dusty columns of footsore men

Who found life sweet and didn’t want to be killed,

Grumbled at officers, grumbled at Governments.

That stainless host you were not. You had your cowards,

Your bullies, your fakers, your sneaks, your savages.

You got tired of marching. You cursed the cold and the rain.

You cursed the war and the food—and went on till the end.

And yet, there was something in you that matched your fable.

What was it? What do your dim, faint voices say?

“Will we ever get home? Will we ever lick them for good?

We’ve got to go on and fight till we lick them for good.

They’ve got the guns and the money and lots more men

But we’ve got to lick them now.

We’re not fighting for slaves.

Most of us never owned slaves and never expect to,

It takes money to buy a slave and we’re most of us poor,

But we won’t lie down and let the North walk over us

About slaves or anything else.

                              We don’t know how it started

But they’ve invaded us now and we’re bound to fight

Till every last damn Yankee goes home and quits.

We used to think we could lick them in one hand’s turn.

We don’t think that any more.

                              They keep coming and coming.

We haven’t got guns that shoot as well as their guns,

We can’t get clothes that wear as well as their clothes,

But we’ve got to keep on till they’re licked and we’re independent,

It’s the only thing we can do.

                              Though some of us wonder—

Some of us try and puzzle the whole thing through,

Some of us hear about Richmond profiteers,

The bombproofs who get exempted and eat good dinners,

And the rest of it, and say, with a bitter tongue,

‘This is the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.’

And more of us, maybe, say that, after a while,

But most of us just keep on till we’re plumb worn out,

We just keep on.

                We’ve got the right men to lead us,

It doesn’t matter how many the Yankees are,

Marse Robert and Old Jack will take care of that,

We’ll have to march like Moses and fight like hell

But we’re bound to win unless the two of them die

And God wouldn’t be so mean as to take them both,

So we just keep on—and keep on—”

                                  To the Wilderness,

To Appomattox, to the end of the dream.

Army of Northern Virginia, army of legend,

Who were your captains that you could trust them so surely?

Who were your battle-flags?

                            Call the shapes from the mist,

Call the dead men out of the mist and watch them ride.

Tall the first rider, tall with a laughing mouth,

His long black beard is combed like a beauty’s hair,

His slouch hat plumed with a curled black ostrich-feather,

He wears gold spurs and sits his horse with the seat

Of a horseman born.

                  It is Stuart of Laurel Hill,

“Beauty” Stuart, the genius of cavalry,

Reckless, merry, religious, theatrical,

Lover of gesture, lover of panache,

With all the actor’s grace and the quick, light charm

That makes the women adore him—a wild cavalier

Who worships as sober a God as Stonewall Jackson,

A Rupert who seldom drinks, very often prays,

Loves his children, singing, fighting, spurs, and his wife.

Sweeney his banjo-player follows him.

And after them troop the young Virginia counties,

Horses and men, Botetort, Halifax,

Dinwiddie, Prince Edward, Cumberland, Nottoway,

Mecklenburg, Berkeley, Augusta, the Marylanders,

The horsemen never matched till Sheridan came.

Now the phantom guns creak by. They are Pelham’s guns.

That quiet boy with the veteran mouth is Pelham.

He is twenty-two. He is to fight sixty battles

And never lose a gun.

                    The cannon roll past,

The endless lines of the infantry begin.

A. P. Hill leads the van. He is small and spare,

His short, clipped beard is red as his battleshirt,

Jackson and Lee are to call him in their death-hours.

Dutch Longstreet follows, slow, pugnacious and stubborn,

Hard to beat and just as hard to convince,

Fine corps commander, good bulldog for holding on,

But dangerous when he tries to think for himself,

He thinks for himself too much at Gettysburg,

But before and after he grips with tenacious jaws.

There is D. H. Hill—there is Early and Fitzhugh Lee—

Yellow-haired Hood with his wounds and his empty sleeve,

Leading his Texans, a Viking shape of a man,

With the thrust and lack of craft of a berserk sword,

All lion, none of the fox.

                        When he supersedes

Joe Johnston, he is lost, and his army with him,

But he could lead forlorn hopes with the ghost of Ney.

His bigboned Texans follow him into the mist.

Who follows them?

                These are the Virginia faces,

The Virginia speech. It is Jackson’s foot-cavalry,

The Army of the Valley,

It is the Stonewall Brigade, it is the streams

Of the Shenandoah, marching.

                            Ewell goes by,

The little woodpecker, bald and quaint of speech,

With his wooden leg stuck stiffly out from his saddle,

He is muttering, “Sir, I’m a nervous Major-General,

And whenever an aide rides up from General Jackson

I fully expect an order to storm the North Pole.”

He chuckles and passes, full of crotchets and courage,

Living on frumenty for imagined dyspepsia,

And ready to storm the North Pole at a Jackson phrase.

Then the staff—then little Sorrel—and the plain

Presbyterian figure in the flat cap,

Throwing his left hand out in the awkward gesture

That caught the bullet out of the air at Bull Run,

Awkward, rugged and dour, the belated Ironside

With the curious, brilliant streak of the cavalier

That made him quote Mercutio in staff instructions,

Love lancet windows, the color of passion-flowers,

Mexican sun and all fierce, taut-looking fine creatures;

Stonewall Jackson, wrapped in his beard and his silence,

Cromwell-eyed and ready with Cromwell’s short

Bleak remedy for doubters and fools and enemies,

Hard on his followers, harder on his foes,

An iron sabre vowed to an iron Lord,

And yet the only man of those men who pass

With a strange, secretive grain of harsh poetry

Hidden so deep in the stony sides of his heart

That it shines by flashes only and then is gone.

It glitters in his last words.

                              He is deeply ambitious,

The skilled man, utterly sure of his own skill

And taking no nonsense about it from the unskilled,

But God is the giver of victory and defeat,

And Lee, on earth, vicegerent under the Lord.

Sometimes he differs about the mortal plans

But once the order is given, it is obeyed.

We know what he thought about God. One would like to know

What he thought of the two together, if he so mingled them.

He said two things about Lee it is well to recall.

When he first beheld the man that he served so well,

“I have never seen such a fine-looking human creature.”

Then, afterwards, at the height of his own fame,

The skilled man talking of skill, and something more.

“General Lee is a phenomenon,

He is the only man I would follow blindfold.”

Think of those two remarks and the man who made them

When you picture Lee as the rigid image in marble.

No man ever knew his own skill better than Jackson

Or was more ready to shatter an empty fame.

He passes now in his dusty uniform.

The Bible jostles a book of Napoleon’s Maxims

And a magic lemon deep in his saddlebags.