Classic Poem

There's the old Wesleyan church between the roads;
It stands in a little corner of land
That Long-Bob Somerville gave to the church
Before the War. It won't be standing long;
The horse-shed rotted in the sills and fell
Only last year; and now it isn't safe
To go up the old stairway to the bell
Hung on timbers in the high, square steeple;
And the window-panes are falling out fast.
We hold a Union Service there Sundays,
But no one takes an interest in the church.
I can look ahead and see it flat
Some morning after a high West wind.
City folks like to come and look at it.
They call it " Georgian " ; I don't know
Just what they mean.

But I remember well
The way the church used to look in war time,
When we offered prayers for the men who went
To fight to free the slaves down in the South,
Fired by the Abolitionist preacher.
Not many of the boys ever came back.
Benjamin Putnam, who wrote poetry,
Died at Cold Harbor, and Uncle Jeremiah
Was shot at Antietam. Solon came back.
He fought at Gettysburg and went marching
With Sherman from Atlanta to the sea,
And never got a scratch during the war.
And Erastus Sheffer got back limping,
With one coat sleeve pinned up to the shoulder.
He was a New York artilleryman,
Who loved his gun better than his kinfolk,
And stuck by it to the end — fighting hard.
We used to set boards along the windows,
With holes bored in them for the tall candles.
Every window was ablaze on the night
Of the Emancipation Proclamation,
When we all kneeled down with tears on our cheeks
And thanked God for Abraham Lincoln.

You've noticed that queer grave in the churchyard.
It does look curious to a stranger
To see a grave with two big monuments.
There's a story about it — a long one.
Sit down on the grass and you shall hear it;
It takes a long time to tell a story,
For there's so much one must feel and conjecture.
There must be a floating feeling round you
That fills in the thin places you can't tell,
And brings out all the truth that you don't know.
Silence Davis is buried there.
She died in her youth, of hunger and hardship
Folks said; I say it was a broken heart.
She was the only daughter of Nate Hills,
A scholar and a gentleman-farmer.
He wrote a book once and had it published,
And he had a telescope in the garret
And spent clear nights searching the heavens.
Nate had an only daughter, tall, grey-eyed;
He called her that old-fashioned name, " Silence " ;
And she bore it well, for she was quiet
And womanly, sweet as a June lily,
But stubborn, for her father's wilfulness
Came down to her as an inheritance.

In the first flush of her young womanhood
She married a clod — a handsome fellow
(If you can see beauty in flesh and eyes),
Raised on Mormon Hill, where they count women
Less than fat cattle. They used to trade them
Till the Government stepped in and stopped it.
One man traded his wife for a calf and a bridle,
Another for a colt and a halter,
And everybody changed round once in a while,
So they said, — of course that is long ago;
But he came of that stock, and blood will tell.
Zoph Davis was as wilful as a steer
Out on fresh pasture. He wanted Silence
For his woman, and she would marry him
And leave her father's comfortable home
To live in a shack up on Mormon Hill.

I'm not saying Zoph meant to be cruel;
He didn't know what a gentle woman was like —
Not her kind, all softness and sunshine;
He only knew the fierce kind of women
Who could shoot and ride and starve with the men,
Who defended themselves as the men did
And asked no favors nor took any.
His mother would have shot a man who struck her.
He expected Silence to fight her way.
But Silence faded and pined and sickened,
And when her baby came she died gladly,
And her father cursed Zoph, and brought her here
And laid her in the old Hills burying plot.
He set this headstone of Vermont marble.
It reads:

SILENCE THE BELOVED DAUGHTER OF NATHAN HILLS

You see there is nothing on the headstone
About her being married — not a word
To show that she had gone away from home.
Zoph went away before the headstone was set.
He worked in the Bark-woods the whole summer.
When he came out, he went to the church-yard
And saw the headstone and the inscription
That Nate Hills had had cut in the marble.
We never heard a word of him for a year.
Folks thought that he was dead. Then there came word
He had got a job at the Garnet Mines.
Not long after that, he drove back in here
And brought another headstone for his wife.
He set it up close by the first one.
It was Vermont marble — the same pattern —
But the inscription; that was different.
You read it:

SILENCE THE BELOVED WIFE OF ZOPHER DAVIS