The Cumberland.
(March, 1862.)
Some names there are of telling sound,
Whose voweled syllables free
Are pledge that they shall ever live renowned;
Such seem to be
A Frigate’s name (by present glory spanned)—
The Cumberland.
Sounding name as ere was sung,
Flowing, rolling on the tongue—
Cumberland! Cumberland!
She warred and sunk. There’s no denying
That she was ended—quelled;
And yet her flag above her fate is flying,
As when it swelled
Unswallowed by the swallowing sea: so grand—
The Cumberland.
Goodly name as ere was sung,
Roundly rolling on the tongue—
Cumberland! Cumberland!
What need to tell how she was fought—
The sinking flaming gun—
The gunner leaping out the port—
Washed back, undone!
Her dead unconquerably manned
The Cumberland.
Noble name as ere was sung,
Slowly roll it on the tongue—
Cumberland! Cumberland!
Long as hearts shall share the flame
Which burned in that brave crew,
Her fame shall live—outlive the victor’s name;
For this is due.
Your flag and flag-staff shall in story stand—
Cumberland!
Sounding name as ere was sung,
Long they’ll roll it on the tongue—
Cumberland! Cumberland!
In the Turret.
(March, 1862.)
Your honest heart of duty, Worden,
So helped you that in fame you dwell;
You bore the first iron battle’s burden
Sealed as in a diving-bell.
Alcides, groping into haunted hell
To bring forth King Admetus’ bride,
Braved naught more vaguely direful and untried.
What poet shall uplift his charm,
Bold Sailor, to your height of daring,
And interblend therewith the calm,
And build a goodly style upon your bearing.
Escaped the gale of outer ocean—
Cribbed in a craft which like a log
Was washed by every billow’s motion—
By night you heard of Og
The huge; nor felt your courage clog
At tokens of his onset grim:
You marked the sunk ship’s flag-staff slim,
Lit by her burning sister’s heart;
You marked, and mused: “Day brings the trial:
Then be it proved if I have part
With men whose manhood never took denial.”
A prayer went up—a champion’s. Morning
Beheld you in the Turret walled
by adamant, where a spirit forewarning
And all-deriding called:
“Man, darest thou—desperate, unappalled—
Be first to lock thee in the armored tower?
I have thee now; and what the battle-hour
To me shall bring—heed well—thou’lt share;
This plot-work, planned to be the foeman’s terror,
To thee may prove a goblin-snare;
Its very strength and cunning—monstrous error!”
“Stand up, my heart; be strong; what matter
If here thou seest thy welded tomb?
And let huge Og with thunders batter—
Duty be still my doom,
Though drowning come in liquid gloom;
First duty, duty next, and duty last;
Ay, Turret, rivet me here to duty fast!—”
So nerved, you fought wisely and well;
And live, twice live in life and story;
But over your Monitor dirges swell,
In wind and wave that keep the rites of glory.
The Temeraire.[3]
(Supposed to have been suggested to an Englishman of the old order by
the fight of the Monitor and Merrimac.)
[3] The Temeraire, that storied ship of the old English fleet, and the
subject of the well-known painting by Turner, commends itself to the
mind seeking for some one craft to stand for the poetic ideal of those
great historic wooden warships, whose gradual displacement is lamented
by none more than by regularly educated navy officers, and of all
nations.
The gloomy hulls, in armor grim,
Like clouds o’er moors have met,
And prove that oak, and iron, and man
Are tough in fibre yet.
But Splendors wane. The sea-fight yields
No front of old display;
The garniture, emblazonment,
And heraldry all decay.
Towering afar in parting light,
The fleets like Albion’s forelands shine—
The full-sailed fleets, the shrouded show
Of Ships-of-the-Line.
The fighting Temeraire,
Built of a thousand trees,
Lunging out her lightnings,
And beetling o’er the seas—
O Ship, how brave and fair,
That fought so oft and well,
On open decks you manned the gun
What cheering did you share,
Impulsive in the van,
When down upon leagued France and Spain
We English ran—
The freshet at your bowsprit
Like the foam upon the can.
Bickering, your colors
Licked up the Spanish air,
You flapped with flames of battle-flags—
Your challenge, Temeraire!
The rear ones of our fleet
They yearned to share your place,
Still vying with the Victory
Throughout that earnest race—
The Victory, whose Admiral,
With orders nobly won,
Shone in the globe of the battle glow—
The angel in that sun.
Parallel in story,
Lo, the stately pair,
As late in grapple ranging,
The foe between them there—
When four great hulls lay tiered,
And the fiery tempest cleared,
And your prizes twain appeared,
Temeraire!
[4] Some of the cannon of old times, especially the brass ones, unlike
the more effective ordnance of the present day, were cast in shapes
which Cellini might have designed, were gracefully enchased, generally
with the arms of the country. A few of them—field-pieces—captured in
our earlier wars, are preserved in arsenals and navy-yards.
But Trafalgar’ is over now,
The quarter-deck undone;
The carved and castled navies fire
Their evening-gun.
O, Tital Temeraire,
Your stern-lights fade away;
Your bulwarks to the years must yield,
And heart-of-oak decay.
A pigmy steam-tug tows you,
Gigantic, to the shore—
Dismantled of your guns and spars,
And sweeping wings of war.
The rivets clinch the iron-clads,
Men learn a deadlier lore;
But Fame has nailed your battle-flags—
Your ghost it sails before:
O, the navies old and oaken,
O, the Temeraire no more!
A Utilitarian View of the Monitors Fight.
Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse,
More ponderous than nimble;
For since grimed War here laid aside
His Orient pomp, ’twould ill befit
Overmuch to ply
The Rhyme’s barbaric cymbal.
Hail to victory without the gaud
Of glory; zeal that needs no fans
Of banners; plain mechanic power
Plied cogently in War now placed—
Where War belongs—
Among the trades and artisans.
Yet this was battle, and intense—
Beyond the strife of fleets heroic;
Deadlier, closer, calm ’mid storm;
No passion; all went on by crank,
Pivot, and screw,
And calculations of caloric.
Needless to dwell; the story’s known.
the ringing of those plates on plates
Still ringeth round the world—
The clangor of that blacksmith’s fray.
The anvil-din
Resounds this message from the Fates:
War shall yet be, and to the end;
But war-paint shows the streaks of weather;
War yet shall be, but warriors
Are now but operatives; War’s made
Less grand than Peace,
And a singe runs through lace and feather.
Shiloh.
A Requiem.
(April, 1862.)
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.
The Battle for the Mississipppi.
(April, 1862.)
When Israel camped by Migdol hoar,
Down at her feet her shawm she threw,
But Moses sung and timbrels rung
For Pharaoh’s standed crew.
So God appears in apt events—
The Lord is a man of war!
So the strong wind to the muse is given
In victory’s roar.
Deep be the ode that hymns the fleet—
The fight by night—the fray
Which bore our Flag against the powerful stream,
And led it up to day.
Dully through din of larger strife
Shall bay that warring gun;
But none the less to us who live
It peals—an echoing one.
The shock of ships, the jar of walls,
The rush through thick and thin—
The flaring fire-rafts, glare and gloom—
Eddies, and shells that spin—
The boom-chain burst, the hulks dislodged,
The jam of gun-boats driven,
Or fired, or sunk—made up a war
Like Michael’s waged with leven.
The manned Varuna stemmed and quelled
The odds which hard beset;
The oaken flag-ship, half ablaze,
Passed on and thundered yet;
While foundering, gloomed in grimy flame,
The Ram Manassas—hark the yell!—
Plunged, and was gone; in joy or fright,
The River gave a startled swell.
They fought through lurid dark till dawn;
The war-smoke rolled away
With clouds of night, and showed the fleet
In scarred yet firm array,
Above the forts, above the drift
Of wrecks which strife had made;
And Farragut sailed up to the town
And anchored—sheathed the blade.
The moody broadsides, brooding deep,
Hold the lewd mob at bay,
While o’er the armed decks’ solemn aisles
The meek church-pennons play;
By shotted guns the sailors stand,
With foreheads bound or bare;
The captains and the conquering crews
Humble their pride in prayer.
They pray; and after victory, prayer
Is meet for men who mourn their slain;
The living shall unmoor and sail,
But Death’s dark anchor secret deeps detain.
Yet glory slants her shaft of rays
Far through the undisturbed abyss;
There must be other, nobler worlds for them
Who nobly yield their lives in this.
Malvern Hill.
(July, 1862.)
Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill
In prime of morn and May,
Recall ye how McClellan’s men
Here stood at bay?
While deep within yon forest dim
Our rigid comrades lay—
Some with the cartridge in their mouth,
Others with fixed arms lifted South—
Invoking so
The cypress glades? Ah wilds of woe!
The spires of Richmond, late beheld
Through rifts in musket-haze,
Were closed from view in clouds of dust
On leaf-walled ways,
Where streamed our wagons in caravan;
And the Seven Nights and Days
Of march and fast, retreat and fight,
Pinched our grimed faces to ghastly plight—
Does the elm wood
Recall the haggard beards of blood?
The battle-smoked flag, with stars eclipsed,
We followed (it never fell!)—
In silence husbanded our strength—
Received their yell;
Till on this slope we patient turned
With cannon ordered well;
Reverse we proved was not defeat;
But ah, the sod what thousands meet!—
Does Malvern Wood
Bethink itself, and muse and brood?
We elms of Malvern Hill
Remember every thing;
But sap the twig will fill:
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in Spring.
The Victor of Antietam.[5]
(1862.)
[5] Whatever just military criticism, favorable or otherwise, has at any
time been made upon General McClellan’s campaigns, will stand. But if,
during the excitement of the conflict, aught was spread abroad tending
the unmerited disparagement of the man, it must necessarily die out,
though not perhaps without leaving some traces, which may or may not
prove enduring. Some there are whose votes aided in the re-election of
Abraham Lincoln, who yet believed, and retain the belief, that General
McClellan, to say the least, always proved himself a patriotic and
honorable soldier. The feeling which surviving comrades entertain for
their late commnder is one which, from its passion, is susceptible of
versified representation, and such it receives.
When tempest winnowed grain from bran;
And men were looking for a man,
Authority called you to the van,
McClellan:
Along the line the plaudit ran,
As later when Antietam’s cheers began.
Through storm-cloud and eclipse must move
Each Cause and Man, dear to the stars and Jove;
Nor always can the wisest tell
Deferred fulfillment from the hopeless knell—
The struggler from the floundering ne’er-do-well.
A pall-cloth on the Seven Days fell,
Mcclellan—
Unprosperously heroical!
Who could Antietam’s wreath foretell?
Authority called you; then, in mist
And loom of jeopardy—dismissed.
But staring peril soon appalled;
You, the Discarded, she recalled—
Recalled you, nor endured delay;
And forth you rode upon a blasted way,
Arrayed Pope’s rout, and routed Lee’s array,
McClellan:
Your tent was choked with captured flags that day,
McClellan.
Antietam was a telling fray.
Recalled you; and she heard your drum
Advancing through the glastly gloom.
You manned the wall, you propped the Dome,
You stormed the powerful stormer home,
McClellan:
Antietam’s cannon long shall boom.
At Alexandria, left alone,
McClellan—
Your veterans sent from you, and thrown
To fields and fortunes all unknown—
What thoughts were yours, revealed to none,
While faithful still you labored on—
Hearing the far Manassas gun!
McClellan,
Only Antietam could atone.
You fought in the front (an evil day,
McClellan)—
The fore-front of the first assay;
The Cause went sounding, groped its way;
The leadsmen quarrelled in the bay;
Quills thwarted swords; divided sway;
The rebel flushed in his lusty May:
You did your best, as in you lay,
McClellan.
Antietam’s sun-burst sheds a ray.
Your medalled soldiers love you well,
McClellan:
Name your name, their true hearts swell;
With you they shook dread Stonewall’s spell,
[6]With you they braved the blended yell
Of rebel and maligner fell;
With you in shame or fame they dwell,
McClellan:
Antietam-braves a brave can tell.
[6] At Antietam Stonewall Jackson led one wing of Lee’s army, consequenty
sharing that day in whatever may be deemed to have been the fortunes of
his superior.
And when your comrades (now so few,
McClellan—
Such ravage in deep files they rue)
Meet round the board, and sadly view
The empty places; tribute due
They render to the dead—and you!
Absent and silent o’er the blue;
The one-armed lift the wine to you,
McClellan,
And great Antietam’s cheers renew.
Battle of Stone River, Tennessee.
A View from Oxford Cloisters.
(January, 1863.)
With Tewksbury and Barnet heath
In days to come the field shall blend,
The story dim and date obscure;
In legend all shall end.
Even now, involved in forest shade
A Druid-dream the strife appears,
The fray of yesterday assumes
The haziness of years.
In North and South still beats the vein
Of Yorkist and Lancastrian.
Our rival Roses warred for Sway—
For Sway, but named the name of Right;
And Passion, scorning pain and death,
Lent sacred fervor to the fight.
Each lifted up a broidered cross,
While crossing blades profaned the sign;
Monks blessed the fraticidal lance,
And sisters scarfs could twine.
Do North and South the sin retain
Of Yorkist and Lancastrian?
But Rosecrans in the cedarn glade,
And, deep in denser cypress gloom,
Dark Breckenridge, shall fade away
Or thinly loom.
The pale throngs who in forest cowed
Before the spell of battle’s pause,
Forefelt the stillness that shall dwell
On them and on their wars.
North and South shall join the train
Of Yorkist and Lancastrian.
But where the sword has plunged so deep,
And then been turned within the wound
By deadly Hate; where Climes contend
On vasty ground—
No warning Alps or seas between,
And small the curb of creed or law,
And blood is quick, and quick the brain;
Shall North and South their rage deplore,
And reunited thrive amain
Like Yorkist and Lancastrian?
Running the Batteries,
As observed from the Anchorage above Vicksburgh.
(April, 1863.)
A moonless night—a friendly one;
A haze dimmed the shadowy shore
As the first lampless boat slid silent on;
Hist! and we spake no more;
We but pointed, and stilly, to what we saw.
We felt the dew, and seemed to feel
The secret like a burden laid.
The first boat melts; and a second keel
Is blent with the foliaged shade—
Their midnight rounds have the rebel officers made?
Unspied as yet. A third—a fourth—
Gun-boat and transport in Indian file
Upon the war-path, smooth from the North;
But the watch may they hope to beguile?
The manned river-batteries stretch for mile on mile.
A flame leaps out; they are seen;
Another and another gun roars;
We tell the course of the boats through the screen
By each further fort that pours,
And we guess how they jump from their beds on those shrouded shores.
Converging fires. We speak, though low:
“That blastful furnace can they thread”
“Why, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego
Came out all right, we read;
The Lord, be sure, he helps his people, Ned.”
How we strain our gaze. On bluffs they shun
A golden growing flame appears—
Confirms to a silvery steadfast one:
“The town is afire!” crows Hugh: “three cheers”
Lot stops his mouth: “Nay, lad, better three tears.”
A purposed light; it shows our fleet;
Yet a little late in its searching ray,
So far and strong, that in phantom cheat
Lank on the deck our shadows lay;
The shining flag-ship stings their guns to furious play.
How dread to mark her near the glare
And glade of death the beacon throws
Athwart the racing waters there;
One by one each plainer grows,
Then speeds a blazoned target to our gladdened foes.
The impartial cresset lights as well
The fixed forts to the boats that run;
And, plunged from the ports, their answers swell
Back to each fortress dun:
Ponderous words speaks every monster gun.
Fearless they flash through gates of flame,
The salamanders hard to hit,
Though vivid shows each bulky frame;
And never the batteries intermit,
Nor the boats huge guns; they fire and flit.
Anon a lull. The beacon dies:
“Are they out of that strait accurst”
But other flames now dawning rise,
Not mellowly brilliant like the first,
But rolled in smoke, whose whitish volumes burst.
A baleful brand, a hurrying torch
Whereby anew the boats are seen—
A burning transport all alurch!
Breathless we gaze; yet still we glean
Glimpses of beauty as we eager lean.
The effulgence takes an amber glow
Which bathes the hill-side villas far;
Affrighted ladies mark the show
Painting the pale magnolia—
The fair, false, Circe light of cruel War.
The barge drifts doomed, a plague-struck one.
Shoreward in yawls the sailors fly.
But the gauntlet now is nearly run,
The spleenful forts by fits reply,
And the burning boat dies down in morning’s sky.
All out of range. Adieu, Messieurs!
Jeers, as it speeds, our parting gun.
So burst we through their barriers
And menaces every one:
So Porter proves himself a brave man’s son.
[7]
[7]) Admiral Porter is son of the late Commodore Porter, commander of the
Frigate Essex on that Pacific cruise which ended in the desparate fight
off Valparaiso with the English frigates Cherub and Phœbe, in the year
1814.
Stonewall Jackson.
Mortally wounded at Chancellorsville.
(May, 1863.)
The Man who fiercest charged in fight,
Whose sword and prayer were long—
Stonewall!
Even him who stoutly stood for Wrong,
How can we praise? Yet coming days
Shall not forget him with this song.
Dead is the Man whose Cause is dead,
Vainly he died and set his seal—
Stonewall!
Earnest in error, as we feel;
True to the thing he deemed was due,
True as John Brown or steel.
Relentlessly he routed us;
But we relent, for he is low—
Stonewall!
Justly his fame we outlaw; so
We drop a tear on the bold Virginian’s bier,
Because no wreath we owe.
Stonewall Jackson.
(Ascribed to a Virginian.)
One man we claim of wrought renown
Which not the North shall care to slur;
A Modern lived who sleeps in death,
Calm as the marble Ancients are:
’Tis he whose life, though a vapor’s wreath,
Was charged with the lightning’s burning breath—
Stonewall, stormer of the war.
But who shall hymn the roman heart?
A stoic he, but even more:
The iron will and lion thew
Were strong to inflict as to endure:
Who like him could stand, or pursue?
His fate the fatalist followed through;
In all his great soul found to do
Stonewall followed his star.
He followed his star on the Romney march
Through the sleet to the wintry war;
And he followed it on when he bowed the grain—
The Wind of the Shenandoah;
At Gaines’s Mill in the giant’s strain—
On the fierce forced stride to Manassas-plain,
Where his sword with thunder was clothed again,
Stonewall followed his star.
His star he followed athwart the flood
To Potomac’s Northern shore,
When midway wading, his host of braves
“My Maryland!“ loud did roar—
To red Antietam’s field of graves,
Through mountain-passes, woods and waves,
They followed their pagod with hymns and glaives,
For Stonewall followed a star.
Back it led him to Marye’s slope,
Where the shock and the fame he bore;
And to green Moss-Neck it guided him—
Brief respite from throes of war:
To the laurel glade by the Wilderness grim,
Through climaxed victory naught shall dim,
Even unto death it piloted him—
Stonewall followed his star.
Its lead he followed in gentle ways
Which never the valiant mar;
A cap we sent him, bestarred, to replace
The sun-scorched helm of war:
A fillet he made of the shining lace
Childhood’s laughing brow to grace—
Not his was a goldsmith’s star.
O, much of doubt in after days
Shall cling, as now, to the war;
Of the right and the wrong they’ll still debate,
Puzzled by Stonewall’s star:
“Fortune went with the North elate”
“Ay, but the south had Stonewall’s weight,
And he fell in the South’s vain war.”
Gettysburg.
The Check.
(July, 1863.)
O pride of the days in prime of the months
Now trebled in great renown,
When before the ark of our holy cause
Fell Dagon down—
Dagon foredoomed, who, armed and targed,
Never his impious heart enlarged
Beyond that hour; god walled his power,
And there the last invader charged.
He charged, and in that charge condensed
His all of hate and all of fire;
He sought to blast us in his scorn,
And wither us in his ire.
Before him went the shriek of shells—
Aerial screamings, taunts and yells;
Then the three waves in flashed advance
Surged, but were met, and back they set:
Pride was repelled by sterner pride,
And Right is a strong-hold yet.
Before our lines it seemed a beach
Which wild September gales have strown
With havoc on wreck, and dashed therewith
Pale crews unknown—
Men, arms, and steeds. The evening sun
Died on the face of each lifeless one,
And died along the winding marge of fight
And searching-parties lone.
Sloped on the hill the mounds were green,
Our center held that place of graves,
And some still hold it in their swoon,
And over these a glory waves.
The warrior-monument, crashed in fight,
[8]Shall soar transfigured in loftier light,
A meaning ampler bear;
Soldier and priest with hymn and prayer
Have laid the stone, and every bone
Shall rest in honor there.
[8] Among numerous head-stones or monuments on Cemetery Hill, marred or
destroyed by the enemy’s concentrated fire, was one, somewhat
conspicuous, of a Federal officer killed before Richmond in 1862.
On the 4th of July 1865, the Gettysburg National Cemetery, on the same
height with the original burial-ground, was consecrated, and the
corner-stone laid of a commemorative pile.