FullReads

Where are the birds and boys?
Who shall go chestnutting when
October returns? The nuts–
O, long ere they grow again.

They snug their huts with the chapel-pews,
In court-houses stable their steeds–
Kindle their fires with indentures and bonds,
And old Lord Fairfax’s parchment deeds;
And Virginian gentlemen’s libraries old–
Books which only the scholar heeds–
Are flung to his kennel. It is ravage and range,
And gardens are left to weeds.

Turned adrift into war
Man runs wild on the plain,
Like the jennets let loose
On the Pampas–zebras again.

Like the Pleiads dim, see the tents through the storm–
Aloft by the hill-side hamlet’s graves,
On a head-stone used for a hearth-stone there
The water is bubbling for punch for our braves.
What if the night be drear, and the blast
Ghostly shrieks? their rollicking staves
Make frolic the heart; beating time with their swords,
What care they if Winter raves?

Is life but a dream? and so,
In the dream do men laugh aloud?
So strange seems mirth in a camp,
So like a white tent to a shroud.

II

The May-weed springs; and comes a Man
And mounts our Signal Hill;
A quiet Man, and plain in garb–
Briefly he looks his fill,
Then drops his gray eye on the ground,
Like a loaded mortar he is still:
Meekness and grimness meet in him–
The silent General.

Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant, and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants,
And the happy world disarm.

That eve a stir was in the camps,
Forerunning quiet soon to come
Among the streets of beechen huts
No more to know the drum.
The weed shall choke the lowly door,
And foxes peer within the gloom,
Till scared perchange by Mosby’s prowling men,
Who ride in the rear of doom.

Far West, and farther South,
Wherever the sword has been,
Deserted camps are met,
And desert graves are seen.

The livelong night they ford the flood;
With guns held high they silent press,
Till shimmers the grass in their bayonets’ sheen–
On Morning’s banks their ranks they dress;
Then by the forests lightly wind,
Whose waving boughs the pennons seem to bless,
Borne by the cavalry scouting on–
Sounding the Wilderness.

Like shoals of fish in spring
That visit Crusoe’s isle,
The host in the lonesome place–
The hundred thousand file.

The foe that held his guarded hills
Must speed to woods afar;
For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth
With the slowly-smoked cigar–
The scheme that smouldered through winter long
Now bursts into act–into waw–
The resolute scheme of a heart as calm
As the Cyclone’s core.

The fight for the city is fought
In Nature’s old domain;
Man goes out to the wilds,
And Orpheus’ charm is vain.

In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay–the rusted gun,
Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat
And cuddled-up skeleton;
And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged–
But the Year and the Man were gone.

At the height of their madness
The night winds pause,
Recollecting themselves;
But no lull in these wars.

A gleam!–a volley! And who shall go
Storming the swarmers in jungles dread?
No cannon-ball answers, no proxies are sent–
They rush in the shrapnel’s stead.
Plume and sash are vanities now–
Let them deck the pall of the dead;
They go where the shade is, perhaps into Hades,
Where the brave of all times have led.

There’s a dust of hurrying feet,
Bitten lips and bated breath,
And drums that challenge to the grave,
And faces fixed, forefeeling death.

What husky huzzahs in the hazy groves–
What flying encounters fell;
Pursuer and pursued like ghosts disappear
In gloomed shade–their end who shall tell?
The crippled, a ragged-barked stick for a crutch,
Limp to some elfin dell–
Hobble from the sight of dead faces–white
As pebbles in a well.

Few burial rites shall be;
No priest with book and band
Shall come to the secret place
Of the corpse in the foeman’s land.

Watch and fast, march and fight–clutch your gun?
Day-fights and night-fights; sore is the strees;
Look, through the pines what line comes on?
Longstreet slants through the hauntedness?
‘Tis charge for charge, and shout for yell:
Such battles on battles oppress–
But Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well,
And emerged from the Wilderness.

Emerged, for the way was won;
But the Pillar of Smoke that led
Was brand-like with ghosts that went up
Ashy and red.

None can narrate that strife in the pines,
A seal is on it–Sabaean lore!
Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme
But hints at the maze of war–
Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom,
And fires which creep and char–
A riddle of death, of which the slain
Sole solvers are.

Long they withhold the roll
Of the shroudless dead. It is right;
Not yet can we bear the flare
Of the funeral light.