Classic Poem

Thus crossed they the Potomac, hope's mirage
Shaping illusions. From South Mountain driven,
Lee moved his Army southward in recoil,
Back towards the river and Virginia's zones.

'Twixt Sharpsburg and Antietam's Creek he stood
Upon a ledge of rock, his anxious eyes
Fixed on the field, watching his great defense.
All things he saw and heard and subtly knew, —
Hooker and Jackson in terrific fight;
Mansfield's quick charge to death at Dunker Church;
The Twelfth Corps heading to a besom of fire;
The half of Stonewall's matchless battle-line
In long rows lying midst the crimson corn;
Hooker borne wounded back through flame and smoke,
And Sedgwick's brave Brigade rolled upon doom
By the resistless storm of Southern fire.
About the Church, wild fury; by the Bridge,
Red surge and foam; and the engaged plateau —
Four times now lost, now won — a ghastly stretch
Swept by the levin and the shouts of war.

He saw the Cornfield, filled with flame and gore,
Crossed and re-crossed by his devoted troops;
The East Wood shaken by the havocking;
The Bloody Lane crowded with Southern dead;
While all about him raged his smoking guns
Above the ebb and flow, triumph, defeat,
Carnage and wreckage, and the wind-blown wails
Of twenty thousand bleeding dying men.

There as he stood like some fierce lion at bay,
Hard-pressed and desperate, within him rose
The ancestral ancient spirit of the Bruce
Got from the loins of gloried battle-sires,
The rampant awesome nature leonine,
Deliberate and terrible. With tides
Of blood before him, with wide swaths of dead
About his feet, he firmly stood, and seemed
As 'twere the inviolate arbiter of fate
From whom fell back, awed and obedient,
His every chief, feeling his majesty.

All the next day he waited in wild reck
Of every risking of the foe's assault —
The foe's assault next day, which never came.