War

This is the Arsenal.    From floor to ceiling,
    Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;
But front their silent pipes no anthem pealing
    Startles the villages with strange alarms.

Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,
    When the death-angel touches those swift keys
What loud lament and dismal Miserere
    Will mingle with their awful symphonies

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,
    The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
    In long reverberations reach our own.

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer,
    Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman's song,
And loud, amid the universal clamor,
O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong.

I hear the Florent...

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
    On this Field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
    Nor sentry's shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before,
    And started to your feet
At the cannon's sudden roar,
    Or the drum's redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death
    No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
    No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,
    Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
    It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
    The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
    Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green
    We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
    ...

One blossoming rose-tree, like a beautiful thought
Nursed in a broken mind, that waits and schemes,
Survives, though shattered, and about it caught,
The strangling dodder streams.

Gaunt weeds: and here a bayonet or pouch,
Rusty and rotting where men fought and slew:
Bald, trampled paths that seem with fear to crouch,
Feeling a bloody dew.

Here nothing that was beauty's once remains.
War left the garden to its dead alone:
And Life and Love, who toiled here, for their pains
Have nothing once their own.

Death leans upon the battered door, at gaze
The house is silent where there once was stir
Of husbandry, that led laborious days,
With Love for comforter.

Now in Love's place, Death, old and halt and blind,
Gropes, searching everywhere ...

All through the summer night, down the long lane in flower,
            The moon-white lane,
All through the summer night,--dim as a shower,
            Glimmer and fade the Twain:
Over the cricket hosts, throbbing the hour by hour,
            Young voices bloom and wane.

Down the long lane they go, and past one window, pale
            With visions silver-blurred;
Stirring the heart that waits,--the eyes that fail
            After a spring deferred.
Query, and hush, and Ah!--dim through a moon-lit veil,
            The same one word.

Down the long lane, entwined with all the fragrance there;
            The lane in flower somehow
With youth, and plighted hands, and star-strewn air,
            And muted 'Thee' and 'Thou':--
All the wild bloom an...

(1916)


I.

I found a dreadful acre of the dead,
    Marked with the only sign on earth that saves.
The wings of death were hurrying overhead,
    The loose earth shook on those unquiet graves;

For the deep gun-pits, with quick stabs of flame,
    Made their own thunders of the sunlit air;
Yet, as I read the crosses, name by name,
    Mort pour la France, it seemed that peace was there;
Sunlight and peace, a peace too deep for thought,
    The peace of tides that underlie our strife,
The peace with which the moving heavens are fraught,
    The peace that is our everlasting life.

The loose earth shook. The very hills were stirred.
The silence of the dead was all I heard.


II.

We, who lie here, have...

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

Berlin, Germany, gave the school children a half holiday to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania.

War declares a holiday;
Little children, run and play.
Ring-a-rosy round the earth
With the garland of your mirth.

Shrill a song brim full of glee
Of a great ship sunk at sea.
Tell with pleasure and with pride
How a hundred children died.

Sing of orphan babes, whose cries
Beat against unanswering skies;
Let a mother's mad despair
Lend staccato to your air.

Sing of babes who drowned alone;
Sing of headstones, marked 'Unknown';
Sing of homes made desolate
Where the stricken mourners wait.

Sing of battered corpses tossed
By the heedless waves, and lost.
Run, sweet children, sing and play;
War declares a holiday.

    My job is done; my rhymes are ranked and ready,
    My word-battalions marching verse by verse;
    Here stanza-companies are none too steady;
    There print-platoons are weak, but might be worse.
    And as in marshalled order I review them,
    My type-brigades, unfearful of the fray,
    My eyes that seek their faults are seeing through them
    Immortal visions of an epic day.

    It seems I'm in a giant bowling-alley;
    The hidden heavies round me crash and thud;
    A spire snaps like a pipe-stem in the valley;
    The rising sun is like a ball of blood.
    Along the road the "fantassins" are pouring,
    And some are gay as fire, and some steel-stern. . . .
    Then back again I see the red tide pouring,
    Along the reeking road from Hebutern...

    I stood upon the Plain,
    That had trembled when the slain,
Hurled their proud, defiant curses at the battle-heated foe,
    When the steed dashed right and left,
    Through the bloody gaps he cleft,
When the bridle-rein was broken, and the rider was laid low.

    What busy feet had trod
    Upon the very sod
Where I marshalled the battalions of my fancy to my aid!
    And I saw the combat dire,
    Heard the quick, incessant fire,
And the cannons' echoes startling the reverberating glade.

    I saw them, one and all,
    The banners of the Gaul
In the thickest of the contest, round the resolute Montcalm;
    The well-attended Wolfe,
    Emerging from the gulf
Of the battle's fiery furnace, like the swelling of a psalm.

    I...

(1917)

The first four lines of this poem were written for inscription on the first joint memorial to the American and British soldiers who fell in the Revolutionary War. This memorial was recently dedicated at Princeton.


I.

Here Freedom stood, by slaughtered friend and foe,
    And ere the wrath paled or that sunset died,
Looked through the ages: then, with eyes aglow,
    Laid them, to wait that future, side by side.


II.

Now lamp-lit gardens in the blue dusk shine
    Through dog-wood red and white,
And round the gray quadrangles, line by line,
    The windows fill with light,
Where Princeton calls to Magdalen, tower to tower,
    Twin lanthorns of the law,
And those cream-white magnolia boughs embower
    Th...

"Great peace in Europe! Order reigns
From Tiber's hills to Danube's plains!"
So say her kings and priests; so say
The lying prophets of our day.
Go lay to earth a listening ear;
The tramp of measured marches hear;
The rolling of the cannon's wheel,
The shotted musket's murderous peal,
The night alarm, the sentry's call,
The quick-eared spy in hut and hall!
From Polar sea and tropic fen
The dying-groans of exiled men!
The bolted cell, the galley's chains,
The scaffold smoking with its stains!
Order, the hush of brooding slaves!
Peace, in the dungeon-vaults and graves!
O Fisher! of the world-wide net,
With meshes in all waters set,
Whose fabled keys of heaven and hell
Bolt hard the patriot's prison-cell,
And open wide the banquet-hall,
W...

I had seen our splendid soldiers in their khaki uniforms,
    And their leaders with a Sam Brown belt;
I had seen the fighting Britons and Colonials in swarms,
    I had seen the blue-clad Frenchmen, and I felt
That the mighty martial show
Had no new sight to bestow,
    Till I walked on Piccadilly, and my word!
By the bonnie Highland laddies
In their kilts and their plaidies,
    To a wholly new sensation I was stirred.

They were like some old-time picture, or a scene from out a play,
    They were stalwart, they were young, and debonnair;
Their jaunty little caps they wore in such a fetching way,
    And they showed their handsome legs, and didn't care -
And they seemed to own the town
As they strode on up and down -
    Oh, they surely were a sight fo...

Oft have I caught, upon a fitful breeze,
Fragments of far-off melodies,
With ear not coveting the whole,
A part so charmed the pensive soul.
While a dark storm before my sight
Was yielding, on a mountain height
Loose vapours have I watched, that won
Prismatic colours from the sun;
Nor felt a wish that heaven would show
The image of its perfect bow.
What need, then, of these finished Strains?
Away with counterfeit Remains!
An abbey in its lone recess,
A temple of the wilderness,
Wrecks though they be, announce with feeling
The majesty of honest dealing.
Spirit of Ossian! if imbound
In language thou may'st yet be found,
If aught (entrusted to the pen
Or floating on the tongues of men,
Albeit shattered and impaired)
Subsist thy dignity to...

From far Dakota's cañons,
Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the silence,
Haply to-day a mournful wail, haply a trumpet-note for heroes.

The battle-bulletin,
The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,
The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism,
In the midst of their little circle, with their slaughter'd horses for breastworks,
The fall of Custer and all his officers and men.

Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,
The loftiest of life upheld by death,
The ancient banner perfectly maintain'd,
O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!
As sitting in dark days,
Lone, sulky, through the time's thick murk looking in vain for light, for hope,
From unsuspected parts a fierce and momentary proof,

Where the Great Lake's sunny smiles
Dimple round its hundred isles,
And the mountain's granite ledge
Cleaves the water like a wedge,
Ringed about with smooth, gray stones,
Rest the giant's mighty bones.

Close beside, in shade and gleam,
Laughs and ripples Melvin stream;
Melvin water, mountain-born,
All fair flowers its banks adorn;
All the woodland's voices meet,
Mingling with its murmurs sweet.

Over lowlands forest-grown,
Over waters island-strown,
Over silver-sanded beach,
Leaf-locked bay and misty reach,
Melvin stream and burial-heap,
Watch and ward the mountains keep.

Who that Titan cromlech fills?
Forest-kaiser, lord o' the hills?
Knight who on the birchen tree
Carved his savage heraldry?
Priest o' the pine-...

Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed),
Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue
Look the leftovers of mankind that rest,
Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you.
War has its horrors, but has this of good -
That its sure processes sort out and bind
Brave hearts in one intrepid brotherhood
And leave the shams and imbeciles behind.
Now turn we joyful to the great attacks,
Not only that we face in a fair field
Our valiant foe and all his deadly tools,
But also that we turn disdainful backs
On that poor world we scorn yet die to shield -
That world of cowards, hypocrites, and fools.

I plead with tears to thee,
Sweet warbler of the shade,
Breathe not such strains to me,
The sweetest ever made.
Who bade thee slight my woes?
Who taught to pierce my heart?
Leave me to death's repose,
Depart, sweet bird, depart.

Still come, with every strain,
Warm dreams of woeless days;
Still beam, on life's past plain,
Love's long lost golden rays,
That gleam on forms gone by,
On friends I called my own,
Who calmly rest, while I,
Wild wandering, weep alone.

But if thou still must sing,
Sing of my endless woes,
Of Life, a poisoned spring,
Of Love, a scattered rose;
Wail-warble those who weep,
Wild-warble but the brave;
To the wearied, sing of sleep,
And sing, to me, the grave.

("Sur une barricade.")

[June, 1871.]


Like Casabianca on the devastated deck,
In years yet younger, but the selfsame core.
Beside the battered barricado's restless wreck,
A lad stood splashed with gouts of guilty gore,
But gemmed with purest blood of patriot more.

Upon his fragile form the troopers' bloody grip
Was deeply dug, while sharply challenged they:
"Were you one of this currish crew?" - pride pursed his lip,
As firm as bandog's, brought the bull to bay -
While answered he: "I fought with others. Yea!"

"Prepare then to be shot! Go join that death-doomed row."
As paced he pertly past, a volley rang -
And as he fell in line, mock mercies once more flow
Of man's lead-lightning's sudden scathing pang,
But to his home-tur...