Classic Poem

I

Beyond the corn-rows from our Barracks stood
Along the elm-arched turnpike, out of town,
The Quaker Meeting-House, likewise of wood,
With windows burning when the sun went down;
Sided with shingles, roofed like plain big A,
With neither bell-tower, cross, nor apse ...
And whitest when the moon was off that way,
Beyond the rustling corn-rows, after taps ...

II

And in the dark the weary boys would joke
From cot to cot about the Quaker folk:

No double bars of silver braid they wore,
They never learned what the salute was for,
Nor the ten bugle-calls (as we):
They passed the Captains in their homespun gray,
With salutation but by " yea " and " nay, "
And antique " thee " ... and " thee " ...

And trusted to " the inner light, " they say ...
But we? ...

They never learned, beneath a high cross-pole,
On dummy (jerking like a living soul),
Where bayonets best may make a certain hole,
And then pull free ...
They never learned by scrunch of hand and thumb
How deftly one might make two eyeballs come,
Were trusty trench-knife lost in some melee ...
As we ...

But, like their humble-witted forebears, they
Would enter, from the turnpike, each First Day,
That little door — with clapboard lintel telling
By date colonial how old the dwelling
In which they bowed in silent rows to pray ...
And all the week, under the blue sky-dome
(Fringed with the tree-tops on the inner base)
They hoed their corn-rows in the crusted loam,
Or carried back a baby where it fell,
Or gave a child cold water from the well,
Or gathered faggots, piling them in place, —
Against the Winter and the Fires of Home.

III

We passed each other sometimes on the pike ...
But both were growing more and more unlike.
We donned the casques of Sargon's phalanx — they
Renewed the broad-brimmed hats of Yesterday.
And, as on chin and cheek-bone we began
Strangely to take an old barbaric face,
Swart as the profile of Assyrian,
They gained, in spite of all their toil and tan,
Yet more the blondness of their Saxon race.

Yes ... as the wolf-tooth in us made us leer,
Their lips were tightening with resolve and pain;
And as we won the tiger's pointed ear,
They showed the scars of ears cut off again;
And, as our necks grew shorter and more strong
And heads still downward in our bodies bored,
We marked on their necks, as we jeered along,
The print-marks of a three-ply hempen-cord ...

We had our diverse business ... had our haunts ...
We were the revenants ...
While in the very sky-top every night
Above both Barracks and the House of White,
Vega, of the Lyre among the stars,
Burned in a gracious point of azure light ...
Vega, to be (if prophets reckon right)
Sometime the pole-star for this earth of ours.

IV

And when we quit the Barracks for the Boats
With awful shouts in throats
(Though still some human laughter),
It seemed most strange this quiet folk should quit
The Meeting-House and all the peace of it,
And follow after ...

We neither of us quit in fact ...
However alien the surrounding tract ...
And whilst we worked the poison-fire and shell
(Taught, like our foes, to work them fiercely well),
This wistful, meditative folk
Would walk between in No Man's Land,
By crater-pits and molten sand,
And tree-spikes where the copses used to stand —
As if conducted by an ancient spell:
Under the roar, the flame, the smoke,
This quaint, uncanny, visionary folk
Through the barrage would enter each First Day
That legendary door with lintel telling
By anno domini how safe the Dwelling
(Even when the shrapnel on the roof-tree broke)
In which they bowed in silent rows to pray ...
Or was that timbered House of seasoned Oak,
Four-square in lightnings of the booming Plain
Only a phantom and the Devil's joke
On us poor fools, the slayers and the slain? ...
And all the week, under the red sky-dome
(Fringed round with cannon on the inner base)
They hoed their corn-rows in the charmed loam,
Or carried back the bodies where they fell,
Each to its plot of earth and mother-race,
Or wiped from bleeding mouths the grit and foam
To give them water from a certain well,
Or gathered faggots, storing them in place —
Against the Winter and the Fires of Home. . . .

V

The Killing's over and the Barracks creep,
Hauled by a rope and windlass, down the pike —
Sold for machine-shops, very cheap,
Or for a sty and cow-barn, if you like.

The Killing's over, but the Meeting-House
(Within forever quiet as a mouse),
After the hail of shot, the rain of fire,
Still gleams, when hoeing in the fields is done,
With shingle-siding in the setting sun,
Before the hour of Vega of the Lyre ...
You cannot guess how beautiful it seems:
Above the Capitol and marble dome,
Above the spired Cathedral and its dreams,
Unto the way-worn sons of men it gleams
Far down the Land-Marks to the ocean streams,
With windows burning like the Fires of Home.