Classic Poem

One step from the busy street, and there,
With the summer hills around,
In the heart of a summer day it lies, —
A Battle without a sound.

Whatever of battle the eyes may see —
The sweep of men to death,
The dash of horse, and the rush of gun,
The musket's fiery breath;

The massing clouds of the cannon-smoke,
The horror of bursting shell,
The wreck of wheel and caisson,
The surgeon's mimic hell;

The uptossed arms and the ashen cheek,
The droop of the shattered limb,
The men by the blood-pools in the grass,
The bodies stiff and grim.

We see it all, and we hear no sound!
We listen for roar and boom,
For the crack and the ping and the bullet's thud: —
A stillness like the tomb!

No rattle to wheel, no clatter to hoof,
No bugle-call or cry,
No fierce hurrah along that line
Where the columns press to die;

Those sullen prisoners give no oath;
The face in the grass no groan;
Its " Good-bye!" reached a thousand miles,
But we catch never a tone.

Ah, if we could add sound to sight,
And then could paint the strain
And the splendor in the soldier's heart,
Breasting death's hurricane,

And the flashing signals of his thought
To homes that signal back,
And the woman's face and the climbing child
That lie in the bullet's track;

And the breathless pause, each pulse-beat hushed,
Of a watching continent;
And the sense of a nation's fate at stake
In the awful tournament;

And the upturned brows of a million slaves
Reading the face of God
For the word that would lift them into Men,
Or doom them back to the Clod, —

Could we rim all this in those summer hills
And add to what eyes see,
In the cloister quaint by the city street
Then " Gettysburg" would be!

And yet, as I hark, the soundlessness
Seems song of the war's release,
And the beauty to hint, 'mid Battle's woe,
The Battle's after-peace.