Classic Poem

With the buckler and sword into battle
I moved, I was matchless and strong;
I stood in the rush and the rattle
Of shot, and the spirit of song
Was upon me; and youthful and splendid
My armor flashed far in the sun
As I sang of my land. It is ended,
And all has been done, and undone.

I descend with my dead in the trenches,
To-night I bend down on the plain
In the dark, and a memory wrenches
The soul; I turn up to the rain
The cold and beautiful faces,
Ay, faces forbidden for years,
Turn'd up to my face with the traces
Of blood to the white rain of tears.

Count backward the years on your fingers,
While forward rides yonder white moon,
Till the soul turns aside, and it lingers
By a grave that was born of a June;
By the grave of a soul, where the grasses
Are tangled as witch-woven-hair;
Where footprints are not, and where passes
Not any thing known anywhere;

By a grave without tombstone or token,
At a tomb where not fern leaf or fir,
Root or branch, was once bended or broken,
To bestow there the body of her;
For it lives, and the soul perish'd only,
And alone in that land, with these hands,
Did I lay the dead soul, and all lonely
Does it lie to this day in the sands.

Lo! a wild little maiden with tresses
Of gold on the wind of the hills;
Ay, a wise little maiden that guesses
Some good in the cruelest ills;
And a babe with its baby-fists doubled,
And thrust to my beard, and within,
As he laughs like a fountain half-troubled,
When my finger chucks under his chin.

Should the dead not decay, when the culture
Of fields be resumed in the May?
Lo! the days are dark-wing'd as the vulture!
Let them swoop, then, and bear them away:
By the walks let me cherish red flowers,
By the wall teach one tendril to run;
Lest I wake, and I watch all the hours
I shall ever see under the sun.

It is well, may be so, to bear losses,
And to bend and bow down to the rod;
If the scarlet bars and the crosses
Be but rounds up the ladder to God.
But this mocking of men! Ah, that enters
The marrow! the murmurs that swell
To reproach for my song-love, that centres,
Vast land, upon thee, are not well.

And I go, thanking God in my going,
That an ocean flows stormy and deep,
And yet gentler to me is its flowing
Than the storm that forbids me to sleep.
And I go, thanking God, with hands lifted,
That a land lies beyond where the free
And the gentle of heart and the gifted
Of soul have a home in the sea.