Classic Poem

I

The war was weary long.
How long and wearisome it was,
That strife 'twixt valiant right and valiant wrong,
'Twixt anarchy and crystallizing laws!
How weary, weary were the marches
In lands where noontide parches
The pulsing torrents of the veins!
How many steaming plains,
Now ashy waste,
Now thick with honeyed canes,
Our footfalls slowly paced
From glaring rim to rim,
While fever's vipers strayed
Through aching head and limb,
And gnawing hunger preyed
Till e'en that garish land grew dim!
The poison-sucking moons
Hung over black lagoons
And poured their venom through the hazy night;
The dawns were damp with blight,
And all the golden-quivered noons
Shot arrows glowing white
That struck full many down in mortal swoons.

II

Yea, long and fearful was the strife.
How many mighty champions,
How many evil Titans, bounded
From caves of Chaos and Affright
To spend their savage life
In wrestling with the shining ones
Who guard the fortress of the right!
How many cruel clarions sounded
More hortative and loud
Than Roland's trumpet when he bowed
To death in Roncesvale!
I heard all notes that wail
Through battle's vibrant scale.
I heard the dying when they sighed
Like wearied children pitiful and meek;
I heard the wounded when they cried
Their wild, astonished shriek,
The cry of one who feels his pulses fail
And all his strength turn weak
Because beneath him seems to slide
And open swiftly wide
A black and bottomless abyss.

III

I heard the bullet's hiss,
Incessant, sharp and fell,
The keenest, deadliest note
That bursts from battle's throat;
The piercing screech and jarring whirr
Of grape and canister;
And flying from afar, the shell
With changeful, throbbing, husky yell,
A demon tiger, leaping miles
To spread his iron claws
And tear the bleeding files;
While oft arose the charging cry
Of men who battled for a glorious cause
And died when it was beautiful to die.

IV

In long pursuits,
When every blistered footstep seemed to bleed,
When reeling ranks outwore the very brutes
And every furlong showed its dying steed,
How strange, with aching eyes to scan
The flying dust of cavalry,
(The horsemen of our van)
That up and down the roadways ran
Untiringly as billows of the sea,
Retreating and attacking, coming, going,
As wayward as a firefly's glowing,
While here and there
A sabre's glare
Revealed that Death was busy there.
Strange, too, again,
Athwart some scintillating plain,
To see advance through tremulous rays
The solemn, columned haze
Of mighty marchings, visible afar,
The dim afreets of war,
The gliding pillar-clouds of Death's simoom,
The tempest-demons, charged with doom,
That over war's Sahara swarm,
Menacing, monstrous, climbing skies
And hasting to descend in storm.
Of crashing ranks and booming batteries.

V

In middle night,
In dewy silence, ocean-deep,
The hundred-pounder on the bastioned height
Awakened from its ponderous sleep
And poured with all its iron might
A lion-like, a grandly solemn roar
That boomed and shuddered on
From horizon to horizon
Until the lofty frame
Of darkness shook from roof to floor.
Then rose the bomb a-sky,
A lurid, crimson, bloody fiend of flame
That mounted swiftly while that awful cry
Along the rocking welkin fled
It clomb, it soared, it curved its flight,
It paused one fearful moment overhead,
A meteor as red as hell;
Then burst in ruins deadly white,
In ghastly shatterings of livid light,
Magnificent, sublime and fell;
While, clanging like a Pandemonic bell,
The great explosion shuddered on
From horizon to horizon;
And once again the monstrous dome of night
Reeled outward from the roar
And shook from awful peak to boundless floor.

VI

Yea, fearful were the sights and sounds
That swept the war's wide bounds.
It seemed at times as though we trod
Another and most fearful world,
Unknown perchance to God,
Or else long since to ruin hurled.
Yet never did our spirit shrink;
We marched and fought with steady heart;
We marched to Hades' brink
Without a coward start
Our cause was good,
Befitting manhood's noblest mood;
And it was noble, too, to brave
The great unknown beyond the grave
All this was godlike, worthy all
That we had power to give,
Though in the giving we should fall
Sore wounded; yea, should cease to live.