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Humped veteran o’ the Heart-o’-Oak war,
Moored long in haven where the old heroes are,
Never on you did the iron-clads jar!
Your open deck when the boarder assailed,
The frank old heroic hand-to-hand then availed.

But where’s Guert Gan? Still heads he the van?
As before Vera-Cruz, when he dashed splashing
through
The blue rollers sunned, in his brave gold-and-
blue,
And, ere his cutter in keel took the strand,
Aloft waved his sword on the hostile land!
Went up the cheering, the quick chanticleering;
All hands vying–all colors flying:
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” and “Row, boys, row!”
“Hey, Starry Banner!” “Hi, Santa Anna!”
Old Scott’s young dash at Mexico.

Fine forces o’ the land, fine forces o’ the sea,
Fleet, army, and flotilla–tell, heart o’ me,
Tell, if you can, whereaway now they be!

But ah, how to speak of the hurricane
unchained–
The Union’s strands parted in the hawser
over-strained;
Our flag blown to shreds, anchors gone
altogether–
The dashed fleet o’ States in Secession’s foul
weather.

Lost in the smother o’ that wide public stress,
In hearts, private hearts, what ties there were
snapped!
Tell, Hal–vouch, Will, o’ the ward-room mess,
On you how the riving thunder-bolt clapped.
With a bead in your eye and beads in your glass,
And a grip o’ the flipper, it was part and pass:
“Hal, must it be: Well, if come indeed the
shock,
To North or to South, let the victory cleave,
Vaunt it he may on his dung-hill the cock,
But Uncle Sam’s eagle never crow will,
believe.”

Sentiment: ay, while suspended hung all,
Ere the guns against Sumter opened there
the ball,
And partners were taken, and the red dance
began,
War’s red dance o’ death!–Well, we, to a man,
We sailors o’ the North, wife, how could we
lag?–
Strike with your kin, and you stick to the flag!
But to sailors o’ the South that easy way was
barred.
To some, dame, believe (and I speak o’ what I
know),
Wormwood the trial and the Uzzite’s black
shard;
And the faithfuller the heart, the crueller the
throe.
Duty? It pulled with more than one string,
This way and that, and anyhow a sting.
The flag and your kin, how be true unto both?
If either plight ye keep, then ye break the other
troth.
But elect here they must, though the casuists
were out;
Decide–hurry up–and throttle every doubt.

Of all these thrills thrilled at keelson, and
throes,
Little felt the shoddyites a-toasting o’ their
toes;
In mart and bazar Lucre chuckled the huzza,
Coining the dollars in the bloody mint of war.

But in men, gray knights o’ the Order o’ Scars,
And brave boys bound by vows unto Mars,
Nature grappled honor, intertwisting in the
strife:–
But some cut the knot with a thoroughgoing
knife.
For how when the drums beat? How in the fray
In Hampton Roads on the fine balmy day?

There a lull, wife, befell–drop o’ silent in the
din.
Let us enter that silence ere the belchings
re-begin.
Through a ragged rift aslant in the cannonade’s
smoke
An iron-clad reveals her repellent broadside
Bodily intact. But a frigate, all oak,
Shows honeycombed by shot, and her deck
crimson-dyed.
And a trumpet from port of the iron-clad hails,
Summoning the other, whose flag never trails:
“Surrender that frigate, Will! Surrender,
Or I will sink her–ram, and end her!”

‘T was Hal. And Will, from the naked heart-o’-oak,
Will, the old messmate, minus trumpet, spoke,
Informally intrepid,–“Sink her, and be
damned!”* [* Historic.]
Enough. Gathering way, the iron-clad rammed.
The frigate, heeling over, on the wave threw a
dusk.
Not sharing in the slant, the clapper of her bell
The fixed metal struck–uinvoked struck the
knell
Of the Cumberland stillettoed by the
Merrimac’s tusk;
While, broken in the wound underneath the
gun-deck,
Like a sword-fish’s blade in leviathan waylaid,
The tusk was left infixed in the fast-foundering
wreck.
There, dungeoned in the cockpit, the wounded
go down,
And the chaplain with them. But the surges
uplift
The prone dead from deck, and for moment
they drift
Washed with the swimmers, and the spent
swimmers drown.
Nine fathom did she sink,–erect, though hid
from light
Save her colors unsurrendered and spars that
kept the height.