Book + 

IV + 

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 years long 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 though 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 goodbye, 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. + 

“Goodbye,” 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 from 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 mockingbird 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. + 

And now at last, + 

Comes Traveller and his master. Look at them well. + 

The horse is an iron-grey, sixteen hands high, + 

Short back, deep chest, strong haunch, flat legs, small head, + 

Delicate ear, quick eye, black mane and tail, + 

Wise brain, obedient mouth. + 

Such horses are + 

The jewels of the horseman’s hands and thighs, + 

They go by the word and hardly need the rein. + 

They bred such horses in Virginia then, + 

Horses that were remembered after death + 

And buried not so far from Christian ground + 

That if their sleeping riders should arise + 

They could not witch them from the earth again + 

And ride a printless course along the grass + 

With the old manage and light ease of hand. + 

The rider, now. + 

He too, is iron-grey, + 

Though the thick hair and thick, blunt-pointed beard + 

Have frost in them. + 

Broad-foreheaded, deep-eyed, + 

Straight-nosed, sweet-mouthed, firm-lipped, head cleanly set, + 

He and his horse are matches for the strong + 

Grace of proportion that inhabits both. + 

They carry nothing that is in excess + 

And nothing that is less than symmetry, + 

The strength of Jackson is a hammered strength, + 

Bearing the tool marks still. This strength was shaped + 

By as hard arts but does not show the toil + 

Except as justness, though the toil was there. + 

—And so we get the marble man again, + 

The head on the Greek coin, the idol-image, + 

The shape who stands at Washington’s left hand, + 

Worshipped, uncomprehended and aloof, + 

A figure lost to flesh and blood and bones, + 

Frozen into a legend out of life, + 

A blank-verse statue⁠— + 

How to humanize + 

That solitary gentleness and strength + 

Hidden behind the deadly oratory + 

Of twenty thousand Lee Memorial days, + 

How show, in spite of all the rhetoric, + 

All the sick honey of the speechifiers, + 

Proportion, not as something calm congealed + 

From lack of fire, but ruling such a fire + 

As only such proportion could contain? + 

The man was loved, the man was idolized, + 

The man had every just and noble gift. + 

He took great burdens and he bore them well, + 

Believed in God but did not preach too much, + 

Believed and followed duty first and last + 

With marvellous consistency and force, + 

Was a great victor, in defeat as great, + 

No more, no less, always himself in both, + 

Could make men die for him but saved his men + 

Whenever he could save them⁠—was most kind + 

But was not disobeyed⁠—was a good father, + 

A loving husband, a considerate friend: + 

Had little humor, but enough to play + 

Mild jokes that never wounded, but had charm, + 

Did not seek intimates, yet drew men to him, + 

Did not seek fame, did not protest against it, + 

Knew his own value without pomp or jealousy + 

And died as he preferred to live⁠—sans phrase, + 

With commonsense, tenacity and courage, + 

A Greek proportion⁠—and a riddle unread. + 

And everything that we have said is true + 

And nothing helps us yet to read the man, + 

Nor will he help us while he has the strength + 

To keep his heart his own. + 

For he will smile + 

And give you, with unflinching courtesy, + 

Prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders, + 

Photographs, kindness, valor and advice, + 

And do it with such grace and gentleness + 

That you will know you have the whole of him + 

Pinned down, mapped out, easy to understand⁠— + 

And so you have. + 

All things except the heart. + 

The heart he kept himself, that answers all. + 

For here was someone who lived all his life + 

In the most fierce and open light of the sun, + 

Wrote letters freely, did not guard his speech, + 

Listened and talked with every sort of man, + 

And kept his heart a secret to the end + 

From all the picklocks of biographers. + 

He was a man, and as a man he knew + 

Love, separation, sorrow, joy and death. + 

He was a master of the tricks of war, + 

He gave great strokes and warded strokes as great. + 

He was the prop and pillar of a State, + 

The incarnation of a national dream, + 

And when the State fell and the dream dissolved + 

He must have lived with bitterness itself⁠— + 

But what his sorrow was and what his joy, + 

And how he felt in the expense of strength, + 

And how his heart contained its bitterness, + 

He will not tell us. + 

We can lie about him, + 

Dress up a dummy in his uniform + 

And put our words into the dummy’s mouth, + 

Say “Here Lee must have thought,” and “There, no doubt, + 

By what we know of him, we may suppose + 

He felt⁠—this pang or that⁠—” but he remains + 

Beyond our stagecraft, reticent as ice, + 

Reticent as the fire within the stone. + 

Yet⁠—look at the face again⁠—look at it well⁠— + 

This man was not repose, this man was act. + 

This man who murmured “It is well that war + 

Should be so terrible, if it were not + 

We might become too fond of it⁠—” and showed + 

Himself, for once, completely as he lived + 

In the laconic balance of that phrase; + 

This man could reason, but he was a fighter, + 

Skillful in every weapon of defence + 

But never defending when he could assault, + 

Taking enormous risks again and again, + 

Never retreating while he still could strike, + 

Dividing a weak force on dangerous ground + 

And joining it again to beat a strong, + 

Mocking at chance and all the odds of war + 

With acts that looked like hairbreadth recklessness + 

—We do not call them reckless, since they won. + 

We do not see him reckless for the calm + 

Proportion that controlled the recklessness⁠— + 

But that attacking quality was there. + 

He was not mild with life or drugged with justice, + 

He gripped life like a wrestler with a bull, + 

Impetuously. It did not come to him + 

While he stood waiting in a famous cloud, + 

He went to it and took it by both horns + 

And threw it down. + 

Oh, he could bear the shifts + 

Of time and play the bitter loser’s game, + 

The slow, unflinching chess of fortitude, + 

But while he had an opening for attack + 

He would attack with every ounce of strength. + 

His heart was not a stone but trumpet-shaped + 

And a long challenge blew an anger through it + 

That was more dread for being musical + 

First, last, and to the end. + 

Again he said + 

A curious thing to life. + 

“I’m always wanting something.” + 

The brief phrase + 

Slides past us, hardly grasped in the smooth flow + 

Of the well-balanced, mildly-humorous prose + 

That goes along to talk of cats and duties, + 

Maxims of conduct, farming and poor bachelors, + 

But for a second there, the marble cracked + 

And a strange man we never saw before + 

Showed us the face he never showed the world + 

And wanted something⁠—not the general + 

Who wanted shoes and food for ragged men, + 

Not the good father wanting for his children, + 

The patriot wanting victory⁠—all the Lees + 

Whom all the world could see and recognize + 

And hang with gilded laurels⁠—but the man + 

Who had, you’d say, all things that life can give + 

Except the last success⁠—and had, for that, + 

Such glamor as can wear sheer triumph out, + 

Proportion’s son and Duty’s eldest sword + 

And the calm mask who⁠—wanted something still, + 

Somewhere, somehow and always. + 

Picklock biographers, + 

What could he want that he had never had? + 

He only said it once⁠—the marble closed⁠— + 

There was a man enclosed within that image. + 

There was a force that tried Proportion’s rule + 

And died without a legend or a cue + 

To bring it back. The shadow-Lees still live. + 

But the first-person and the singular Lee? + 

The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground + 

But earth’s too small for something in our earth, + 

We’ll make a new earth from the summer’s cloud, + 

From the pure summer’s cloud. + 

It was not that, + 

It was not God or love or mortal fame. + 

It was not anything he left undone. + 

—What does Proportion want that it can lack? + 

—What does the ultimate hunger of the flesh + 

Want from the sky more than a sky of air? + 

He wanted something. That must be enough. + 

Now he rides Traveller back into the mist. + 

Continual guns, be silent for a moment, + 

Be silent, now. + 

We know your thirst. We hear the roll of your wheels + 

Crushing down tangled June, + 

Virginia June, + 

With tires of iron, with heavy caissons creaking, + 

Crushing down maidenhair and wilderness-seal, + 

Scaring the rabbit and the possum-children, + 

Scaring the redbird and the mockingbird + 

As McClellan’s army moves forward. + 

We know your bloody thirst so soon to be slaked + 

With the red burst-grape juices. + 

But now, we would have you silent, a little moment, + 

We would have you hold your peace and point at the moon. + 

For when you speak, we can hear no sound but your sound, + 

And we would hear the voices of men and women + 

For a little while. + 

Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian, + 

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

Luke Breckenridge, the gawky boy from the hills, + 

Clay Wingate, Melora Vilas, Sally Dupré, + 

The slaves in the cabins, ragged Spade in the woods, + 

We have lost these creatures under a falling hammer. + 

We must look for them now, again. + 

Jake Diefer is with the assault that comes from the ships, + 

He has marched, he has fought at Fair Oaks, but he looks the same: + 

A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man + 

Who doesn’t think much of the way that they farm down here, + 

The sun may be good, if you like that sort of sun, + 

But the barns and the fields are different, they don’t look right, + 

They don’t look like Pennsylvania. + 

He spits and wonders. + 

Whenever he can, he reads a short, crumpled letter + 

And tries to puzzle out from the round, stiff writing + 

How things are back on the farm. + 

The boy’s a good boy + 

But the boy can’t do it all, or the woman either. + 

He knows too much about weather and harvest-hands + 

—It’s all right fighting the Rebels to save the Union + 

But they ought to get through with it quicker, now they’ve begun, + 

They don’t take the way the crops are into account, + 

You can’t go off and leave a farm like a store, + 

And you can’t expect a boy to know everything, + 

Or a hired man. No, sir. + 

He walks along like an ox. + 

—He’d like to see the boy and the woman again, + 

Eat pancakes and sleep in a bed and look at the hay⁠— + 

This business comes first but after it’s finished up⁠— + 

He can’t say he’s bothered exactly most of the time. + 

The weather bothers him more than anything. + 

He knows it’s not the same sort of weather down here, + 

But every day when he wakes, he looks at the sky + 

And tries to figure out what it’s like back home. + 

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

Creeps into an old house in beleaguered Richmond + 

And meets a woman dressed in severe black silk + 

With a gentle voice, soft delicate useless hands, + 

A calm, smooth, faded, handsome mask of a face + 

And an incredible secret under her brooches. + 

You would picture her with ivory crochet-needles + 

Demurely tatting, demurely singing mild hymns + 

To an old melodeon before a blurred mirror. + 

She is to live in Richmond throughout the war, + 

A Union spy, never caught, never once suspected, + 

And when she dies, she dies with a shut prim mouth + 

Locked on her mystery. + 

Shippy is afraid. + 

She gives him instructions, he tries to remember them. + 

But his hands are sweating, his eyes creep around the floor. + 

He is afraid of the rustle of the black silk. + 

He wishes he were back in Pollet’s Hotel + 

With Sophy, the chambermaid. + 

The woman talks + 

And he listens, while the woman looks through and through him, + 

Melora Vilas, rising by crack of dawn, + 

Looked at herself in the bottom of her tin basin + 

And wished that she had a mirror. + 

She thought dully, + 

“He’s been gone two months. I can’t get used to it yet. + 

I’ve got to get used to it. Maybe I’ll die instead. + 

No, I’d know if he’d died.” + 

Sally Dupré was tired of scraping lint + 

But her hands kept on. The hours, sunbonneted women, + 

Passed and passed. “If he ever comes back to me!” + 

She finished her scraping and wondered how to make coffee + 

Out of willow-bark and life from a barren stick.⁠ ⁠… + 

Spade the fugitive stared at the bleak North Star.⁠ ⁠… + 

Luke Breckenridge, on picket out in the woods, + 

Remembered a chambermaid at Pollet’s Hotel. + 

And wanted a fight. He hadn’t been lucky, of late. + 

Jim, his cousin, was lucky, out in the West, + 

Riding a horse and capturing Yankee scouts. + 

But his winter here had been nothing but work and mud, + 

He’d nearly got courtmartialed a dozen times, + 

Thought they knew how he could shoot. + 

The chambermaid’s name + 

Was Sophy. She was little and scared and thin, + 

But he liked her looks and he liked the size of her eyes, + 

He’d like to feed her up and see how she looked, + 

If they ever got through with fighting the Yankees here. + 

The Yankees weren’t all Kelceys. He knew that now, + 

But he always looked for Kelceys whenever he fought.⁠ ⁠… + 

Clay Wingate slept in his cloak and dreamed of a girl + 

With Sally’s face and Lucy Weatherby’s mouth + 

And waked again + 

To know today there would be continual guns. + 

Continual guns, silent so brief a moment, + 

Speak again, now, + 

For now your ignorance + 

Drowns out the little voices of human creatures. + 

Jackson slips from the Valley where he has played + 

A dazzling game against Banks and Shield and Frémont + 

And threatened the chess-game-king of Washington + 

Till strong pieces meant to join in McClellan’s game + 

Are held to defend that king. + 

And now the two, + 

Jackson and Lee, strike hard for Seven Days + 

At the host come up from its ships, come up from the sea + 

To take the city set on a deck of land, + 

Till the deck is soaked and red with a bloody juice. + 

And the host goes back. + 

You can read in the histories + 

How the issue wavered, the fog of tiny events, + 

How here, at one dot, McClellan might have wrung + 

A victory, perhaps, with his larger force, + 

And there, on the other hand, played canny and well; + 

How Jackson, for once, moved slowly, how Porter held, + 

And the bitter, exhausted wrestling of Malvern Hill. + 

What we know is this. + 

The host from the ships went back, + 

Hurt but not broken, hammered but undestroyed, + 

To find a new base far up the crook of the James + 

And rest there, panting. + 

Lincoln and Halleck come. + 

The gaunt, plain face is deeper furrowed than ever, + 

The eyes are strained with looking at books of tactics + 

And trying to understand. + 

There is so much + 

For one man to understand, so many lies, + 

So much half-truth, so many counselling voices, + 

So much death to be sown and reaped and still no end. + 

The dead of the Seven Days. The four months dead + 

Boy who used to play with a doll named Jack, + 

Was a bright boy as boys are reckoned and now is dead. + 

The doll named Jack was sometimes a Union soldier, + 

Sometimes a spy. + 

The boy and his brother held + 

A funeral in the White House flowerbeds + 

After suitably executing the doll named Jack + 

But then they thought of a different twist to the game. + 

The gaunt man signed a paper. + 

“The doll named Jack + 

Is pardoned. By order of the President. + 

A. Lincoln.” + 

So Jack was held in honor awhile + 

But next day the boy and his brother forgot the pardon + 

And the doll named Jack was shot and buried once more. + 

So much death to be sown and reaped. + 

So much death to be sown + 

By one no sower of deaths. + 

And still no end. + 

The council is held. The chiefs and captains debate. + 

McClellan clings to his plan of storming the deck + 

From the water ways. He is cool now. He argues well. + 

He has written Lincoln “From the brink of eternity” + 

—A strained, high-flown, remarkable speech of a letter + 

Of the sort so many have written and still will write⁠— + 

Telling how well he has done in saving his army, + 

No thanks to the Government, or to anything else + 

But the pith of his fighting-men and his own craft. + 

Lincoln reads and pockets the speech and thanks him. + 

There had been craft and courage in that retreat + 

And much was due to McClellan. + 

The others speak. + 

Some corps commanders agree and some demur, + 

The Peninsula-stroke has failed and will fail again. + 

Elbow-rubbing Halleck, newly-made chief of staff, + 

Called “Old Brains,” for reasons that history + 

Still tries to fathom, demurs. He urges withdrawal. + 

Washington must be defended first and last⁠— + 

Withdraw the army and put it in front of Washington. + 

Lincoln listens to all as he tries to sift + 

The mustardseed from the twenty barrels of chaff + 

With patient hands. + 

There has been a growth in the man, + 

A tempering of will in these trotting months + 

Whose strong hoofs striking have scarred him again and again. + 

He still rules more by the rein than by whip or spur + 

But the reins are fast in his hands and the horses know it. + 

He no longer says “I think,” but “I have decided.” + 

And takes the strength and the burden of such decision + 

For good or bad on himself. + 

He will bear all things + 

But lack of faith in the Union and that not once. + 

Now at last he decides to recall McClellan’s army + 

For right or wrong. + 

We see the completed thing, + 

Long afterward, knowing all that was still to come, + 

And say “He was wrong.” + 

He saw the incomplete, + 

The difficult chance that might turn a dozen ways + 

And so decided. + 

Be it so. He was wrong. + 

So the deck is cleared and the host goes back to its ships. + 

The bells in the Richmond churches, clanging for Sunday, + 

Clang as if silver were mixed in their sweet bell-metal, + 

The dark cloud lifts, the girls wear flowers again. + 

Virginia June, + 

Crushed under cannon, under the cannon ruts, + 

The trampled grass lifts up its little green guidons, + 

The honeysuckle and the eglantine + 

Blow on their tiny trumpets, + 

Blow out “Dixie,” + 

Blow out “Lorena,” blow the “Bonnie Blue Flag” + 

—There are many dead, there are many too many dead, + 

The hospitals are crowded with broken dolls⁠— + 

But cotton has won again, cotton is haughty, + 

Cotton is mounting again to a sleepy throne, + 

Wheat and iron recoil from the fields of cotton, + 

The sweet grass grows over them, the cotton blows over them, + 

One more battle and free, free, free forever. + 

Cotton moves North in a wave, in a white-crested + 

Wave of puff-blossoms⁠—in a long grey coil + 

Of marching men with tongues as dry as cotton. + 

Cotton and honeysuckle and eglantine + 

Move North in a drenching wave of blossom and guns + 

To wash out wheat and iron forever and ever. + 

There will be other waves that set toward the North, + 

There will be a high tide, + 

But this is the high hour. + 

Jackson has still three hammerstrokes to strike, + 

Lee is still master of the attacking sword, + 

Stuart still carries his black feather high. + 

Put silver in your bell-metal, Richmond bells, + 

The wave of the cotton goes North to your sweet ringing, + 

The first great raiding wave of the Southern dream. + 

Jack Ellyat, in prison deep in the South, + 

Gaunt, bearded, dirty old man with the captive eyes, + 

Lay on his back and stared at the flies on the wall + 

And tried to remember, through an indifferent mist, + 

A green place lost in the woods and a herd of black swine. + 

They came and went and the mist moved round them again. + 

The mist was not death. He was used to death by now, + 

But the mist still puzzled him, sometimes. + 

It was curious⁠—being so weak and yet, used to death. + 

When you were strong, you thought of death as a strong + 

Rider on a black horse, perhaps, or at least + 

As some strong creature, dreadful because so strong. + 

But when you were weak and lived in a place like this, + 

Things changed. There was nothing strong about death any more, + 

He was only the gnawed rat-bone on the dirty floor, + 

That you stumbled across and hardly bothered to curse. + 

That was all. + 

The two Michigan men had died last night. + 

The Ohio brothers were going to die this week, + 

You got pretty soon so you knew when people would die, + 

It passed the time as well as carving bone-rings + 

Playing checkers with straws or learning Italian nouns + 

From the lanky schoolteacher-sergeant from Vermont. + 

Somewhere, sometime, in a tent, by a red loud noise, + 

Under a dirty coat and a slab of tobacco, + 

He had lost a piece of himself, a piece of life. + 

He couldn’t die till he got that piece of him back + 

And felt its ragged edges fit in his heart. + 

Or so he thought. Sometimes, when he slept, he felt + 

As if he were getting it back⁠—but most of the time + 

It was only the mist and counting the flies that bothered him. + 

He heard a footstep near him and turned his head. + 

“Hello, Charley,” he said. “Where you been?” + 

Bailey’s face looked strange, + 

The red, hot face of a hurt and angry boy, + 

“Out hearing the Rebs,” he said. He spat on the floor + 

And broke into long, blue curses. When he was through, + 

“Did you hear them?” he asked. Jack Ellyat tried to remember + 

A gnat-noise buzzing the mist. “I guess so,” he said. + 

“What was it? Two-bottle Ed on another tear?” + 

“Hell,” said Bailey. “They cheered. They’ve licked us again. + 

The news just come. It happened back at Bull Run.” + 

“You’re crazy,” said Ellyat. “That was the start of the war. + 

“I was in that one.” + 

“Oh, don’t be a fool,” said Bailey, + 

“They licked us again, I tell you, the same old place. + 

Pope’s army’s ruined.” + 

“Who’s he?” said Ellyat wearily. + 

“Aw, we had him out West⁠—he’s God Almighty’s pet horse, + 

He came East and told all the papers how good he was, + 

‘Headquarters in the saddle’!” Bailey snickered. + 

“Well, they snaffled his saddle and blame near snaffled him, + 

Jackson and Lee⁠—anyhow they licked us again.” + 

“What about Little Mac?” + 

“Well, Gawd knows what’s happened to him,” + 

Said Bailey, flatly, “Maybe he’s captured, too, + 

Maybe they captured Old Abe and everyone else. + 

I don’t know⁠—you can’t tell from those lyin’ Rebs.” + 

There was a silence. Ellyat lay on his back + 

And watched the flies on the wall for quite a long time. + 

“I wish I had a real newspaper,” said Bailey, + 

“Not one of your Richmond wipers. By God, you know, Jack, + 

When we get back home, I’ll read a newspaper, sometimes. + 

I never was much at readin’ the newspaper + 

But I’d like to read one now, say once in a while.” + 

Ellyat laughed. + 

“You know, Charley,” he said at last. + 

“We’ve got to get out of this place.” + 

Bailey joined in the laugh. + 

Then he stopped and stared at the other with anxious eyes. + 

“You don’t look crazy,” he said. “Stop countin’ those flies.” + 

Ellyat raised himself on one arm. + 

“No, honest, Charley, + 

I mean it, damn it. We’ve got to get out of here. + 

I know we can’t but we’ve got to.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He swallowed dryly. + 

“Look here⁠—” he said, “It just came over me then. + 

I’ve got a girl and she doesn’t know where I am. + 

I left her back in a tent⁠—no, that wasn’t a girl⁠— + 

And you say we got licked again. But that’s just it, Charley. + 

We get licked too much. We’ve got to get out of here.” + 

He sank back to the floor and shut his ghost-ridden eyes. + 

Bailey regarded him for a long, numb moment. + 

“You couldn’t walk a mile and a half,” he muttered, + 

“And, by God, I couldn’t carry you twenty feet, + 

And, by God, if we could, there ain’t no way to get out, + 

But all the same⁠—” + 

“If there was any use tryin’,” + 

He said, half-pleadingly, half-defiantly, + 

“I tell you, Jack, if there was any use tryin’⁠—” + 

He stopped. Ellyat’s eyes were shut. He rose with great care. + 

“I’ll get you some water,” he muttered. “No, let you sleep.” + 

He sat down again and stared at the sleeping face. + 

“He looks bad,” he thought. “I guess I look bad myself. + 

I guess the kid’s goin’ to die if we don’t get out. + 

I guess we’re both goin’ to die. I don’t see why not.” + 

He looked up at the flies on the ceiling and shook his fist. + 

“Listen, you dirty Rebs,” he said, under his breath, + 

“Flap your goddam wings⁠—we’re goin’ to get out of here!” + 

John Brown lies dead in his grave and does not stir, + 

It is nearly three years since he died and he does not stir, + 

There is no sound in his bones but the sound of armies + 

And that is an old sound. + 

He walks, you will say, he walks in front of the armies, + 

A straggler met him, going along to Manassas, + 

With his gun on his shoulder, his phantom-sons at heel, + 

His eyes like misty coals. + 

A dead man saw him striding at Seven Pines, + 

The bullets whistling through him like a torn flag, + 

A madman saw him whetting a sword on a Bible, + 

A cloud above Malvern Hill. + 

But these are all lies. He slumbers. He does not stir. + 

The spring rains and the winter snows on his slumber + 

And the bones of his flesh breed armies and yet more armies + 

But he himself does not stir. + 

It will take more than cannon to shake his fortress, + 

His song is alive and throbs in the tramp of the columns, + 

His song is smoke blown out of the mouth of a cannon, + 

But his song and he are two. + 

The South goes ever forward, the slave is not free, + 

The great stone gate of the Union crumbles and totters, + 

The cotton-blossoms are pushing the blocks apart, + 

The roots of cotton grow in the crevices, + 

(John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.) + 

Soon the fight will be over, the slaves will be slaves forever. + 

(John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.) + 

You did not fight for the Union or wish it well, + 

You fought for the single dream of a man unchained + 

And God’s great chariot rolling. You fought like the thrown + 

Stone, but the fighters have forgotten your dream. + 

(John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.) + 

You fought for a people you did not comprehend, + 

For a symbol chained by a symbol in your own mind, + 

But, unless you arise, that people will not be free. + 

Are there no seeds of thunder left in your bones + 

Except to breed useless armies? + 

(John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.) + 

Arise, John Brown, + 

Call up your sons from the ground, + 

In smoky wreaths, call up your sons to heel, + 

Call up the clumsy country boys you armed + 

With crazy pikes and a fantastic mind. + 

Call up the American names, + 

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

Stevens, the cashiered soldier, bawling his song, + 

Dangerfield Newby, the freed Scotch-mulatto, + 

Watson and Oliver Brown and all the hard-dying. + 

Call up the slug-riddled dead of Harper’s Ferry + 

And cast them down the wind on a raid again. + 

This is the dark hour, + 

This is the ebb-tide, + 

This is the sunset, this is the defeat. + 

The cotton-blossoms are growing up to the sky, + 

The great stone gate of the Union sinks beneath them, + 

And under the giant blossoms lies Egypt’s land, + 

The dark river, + 

The ground of bondage, + 

The chained men. + 

If the great gate falls, the cotton grows over your dream. + 

Find your heart, John Brown, + 

(A-mouldering in the grave.) + 

Call your sons and get your pikes, + 

(A-mouldering in the grave.) + 

Your song goes on, but the slave is still a slave, + 

And all Egypt’s land rides Northward while you moulder in the grave! + 

Rise up, John Brown, + 

(A-mouldering in the grave.) + 

Go down, John Brown, + 

(Against all Egypt’s land) + 

Go down, John Brown, + 

Go down, John Brown, + 

Go down, John Brown, and set that people free! + 