The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 18: ON THE DEATH OF AN UNTRIED SOLDIER

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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

ON THE DEATH OF AN UNTRIED SOLDIER

“He was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royally; and for his passing

The soldiers’ music and the rites of war

Speak loudly for him.”—Hamlet.

He died in armor, died with lance in rest.

The trumpet had not sounded for the charge;

Yet shall his guerdon of golden fame be large,

For he was ready; he had met his test.

No sacrifice is more complete and clean

Than that in the locked soul, secret and still.

Take for a visible deed the perfect will;

Crown with sad pride the accomplishment unseen.

Hang his bright arms undinted on the wall.

In all brave colors whereto his dreams aspired

Blazon his blank shield as his heart desired,

And write above: “The readiness is all.”