Title: John Brown's Body (1928)
Author: Stephen Vincent Benét
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Title: John Brown's Body (1928)
Author: Stephen Vincent Benét
_With an Introduction by_
LEONARD BACON
Note
As this is a poem, not a history, it has seemed unnecessary to me to encumber
it with notes, bibliography, and other historical apparatus.
Nevertheless--besides such original sources as the Official Records, the series
of articles in _Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, _and the letters,
memoirs, and autobiographies of the various leaders involved--I should like to
acknowledge my indebtedness to Channing's _The War for Southern Independence
_and McMaster's _The United States under Lincoln's Administration, _to
Oswald Garrison Villard's _John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After, _to
the various Lives of Lincoln by Lord Charnwood, Carl Sandburg, and Ida Tarbell
and the monumental work of Nicolay and Hay, to Natalie Wright Stephenson's _
Abraham Lincoln: An Autobiography,_ and finally, my very particular
debt to that remarkable first-hand account of life in the Army of the Potomac,
_Four Brothers in Blue, _by Captain Robert Goldthwaite Carter, from which
the stories of Fletcher the sharpshooter and the two brothers at Fredericksburg
are taken.
In dealing with known events I have tried to cleave to historical fact where
such fact was ascertainable. On the other hand, for certain thoughts and
feelings attributed to historical characters, and for the interpretation of
those characters in the poem, I alone must be held responsible.
The account of the defeated Union Army pouring into Washington after the
first Bull Run is founded on a passage in Whitman's _Specimen Days and
Collect._
The Black Horse Troop is an entirely imaginary organization and not to be
confused with the so-called Black Horse Cavalry. In general, no fictional
character in the poem is founded upon a real person, living or dead.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
_Neuilly-sur-Seine, April 1928_
Contents
NOTE
INTRODUCTION
INVOCATION
PRELUDE--The Slaver
BOOK ONE
John Brown's Prayer
John Brown's Speech
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
BOOK SIX
BOOK SEVEN
BOOK EIGHT
INTRODUCTION
Stephen Vincent Benét, the author of _John Brown's Body _and one of the
most splendid human creatures of these tragic times, was born in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, in 1898, the year of the Spanish War and one of the critical
moments of American history. He was the son of an army officer, James Walker
Benét, and of Frances Rose his wife, and he was singularly fortunate in his
inheritance. On his father's side he came of Spanish or, rather, Catalonian
stock, for his great grandfather had emigrated from the Balearic Islands to
Florida early in the 19th century. His mother's people were of English and
Scotch-Irish descent and lived in Pennsylvania. Thus, as a hundred critics have
noticed, he was actually a blend of the North and South, whose conflict none was
to understand better than he. But one might go farther and say that he was a
blend of North and South Europe as well. His father was an officer more than
usually accomplished in his profession, with a passion for poetry, not common
among experts on artillery. His paternal grandfather, General Stephen Vincent
Benét, had played a great part in equipping the Northern armies all through the
Civil War and rose to be Chief of Ordnance after the struggle. An uncle, Mr.
Laurence Benét, is a distinguished mechanical engineer and co-inventor of the
Benét-Mercier machine gun, which unhappily had to be used a great deal in the
first World War. The tradition of the family is military.
It should also be said of the family, all of whom I had the felicity to know,
most of them extremely well, that it is perhaps as distinguished for charm and
ability as any family whatever. I should not hesitate to compare them with the
Adams, the Darwins, or the Trevelyans. Stephen's elder brother, William Rose
Benét, and his sister, Laura Benét, also his senior, are poets of noble ability.
And the grace and humor of the circle left nothing to be desired. I never heard
better or more unaffected conversation on literature anywhere than on the porch
of the Commandant's quarters at Benicia, California, except possibly on the
porch of the Commandant's quarters in Augusta, Georgia. The Colonel was the very
spirit of wit and taste in such matters and intensely diverted by the fact that
his children had turned into poets under his nose. And Mrs. Benét over the
tea-cups was not a whit behind him in her enjoyment and understanding of the
phenomenon. As one privileged to share for many years the pleasures and sorrows
of that enchanting group, I can testify that Stephen Benét was fortunate beyond
most poets in his family environment.
One point is so obvious that to mention it is almost trite. There is a real
connection between the profession of the father and the performance of the son.
In the course of his career, an American soldier is likely to be stationed at
posts all over the country. And Englishmen perhaps do not always realize quite
what this means. It is as far from New York to San Francisco as from London to
Constantinople, and as far from the Canadian border to the southern tip of Texas
as from Birmingham to Gibraltar. And though we speak a common language, which
all but a few eccentrics admit to be English, we have our share of local
diversity and temperament. Stephen Benét had the experience of living in many of
the great regions of the republic, for each of which in turn he developed a
predilection and sympathy. As a preparation for what he was destined to create,
such an opportunity to get the whole country 'into his bones' was beyond
estimation. His love for the red-soiled rolling farmland of Pennsylvania, for
the yellow hills and particolored marshes of San Francisco Bay, for the
half-tropic lowlands and blue-grey mountains of Georgia, for the Sussex
landscapes of southern New England, came naturally and early and remained to him
always. None of our writers has had a larger sense of the country as a whole or
in its parts, as none has made nobler use of that sense. No doubt he was born
with a taste for particularity and humor, which vary notably from region to
region in the United States, but circumstances had given every opportunity to
satisfy any such taste. And genius, achieving a synthesis, was to do the rest.
That genius, as so often happens, was apparent enough when he was a boy of
thirteen, at the time I first knew him, for he already talked with a delightful
and innocent maturity that was without trace of self-conscious precocity. I
still possess a 'scroll' of verses produced by four members of the Benét family
to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday, which I happened to spend with them in
Georgia. Stephen was sixteen then and his part is boy's verse. But I don't think
it is sentiment or hindsight that makes me see the claw of the lion. A year
later, and before he entered Yale, he had forced the penetralia of the
terrifically conservative _Century Magazine, _which is a good deal as if a
sixth-former had blasted his way into _Blackwood. _As the wit put it,
editors then regarded poetry as typographical adornment which might
appropriately be inserted in half-pages, otherwise blank, at the end of highbrow
essays or stories which shocked few churchgoers. That such a magazine should
grant space and pride of place to a sub-freshman was almost alarming. But the
stirring ballad _The Hemp _was evidence enough that 'another county had
been heard from'. Almost at the same time his first book appeared in a series of
little volumes whose authors included Gordon Bottomley and Richard Aldington.
'Five Men and Pompey' is definitely young and Browningesque, but its
derivativeness is of that healthy order that even the inexpert know is
allotropic creativeness. It was only natural and right that he won every prize
for poetry which Yale College could offer by the time he was graduated in 1919,
not to mention preparing a brilliant abridgement of Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine' for
the college dramatic society. It was not hard to foresee a bright future when,
after an additional year in the Graduate School, he left college to live by his
pen.
It has been considered unfortunate that geniuses, like others, have to boil
the pot. But it is well known that it does not hurt the real thing much. Often
Stephen Benét had to write in haste for bread instead of at leisure for love.
But he always seemed able to put the kettle on the fire with his left hand, and
the pot boiled easily. From the time he launched forth there was not a year in
his life that he did not write something better than editors demand. Working to
meet a deadline, he seemed always to have the precious gift of preserving what
was precious. Though some of his stories are hack-work, he always had projects'
in hand that were not in that category. And in 1926, by which time he was
married to Rosemary Carr, herself a poet with a fine lyric gift and his
collaborator in the delightful _A Book of Americans, _the Guggenheim
Foundation gave him a travelling fellowship, subsequently renewed. This at once
relieved him from immediate anxieties and also brought it to pass that _John
Brown's Body, _a poem as American in thought and texture as _Leaves of
Grass, _was written in Paris._
John Brown's Body _is an epic poem with many strands of personality and
action, at first glance only loosely connected but actually woven into one
strong cord. Part of its power for us, and, it is believed, for our friends
across the oceans, is that it tells us things we needed to be told about our
virtues and defects. The great struggle three-quarters of a century ago had
grown dim in recollection, but to forget the issues, the beliefs, the
self-sacrifice on both sides, was to forget our birthright. This book renewed
the sense of 'a great thing done under the sun'. The Civil War, one of the most
furious contests in history, in spite of_ _the contemptuous Moltke's lack
of interest 'in a battle of armed mobs', had its origins in conflicts of
philosophies, moralities, and material interests that lay coiled around each
other like the ghastly Gordian knots of blacksnakes or copperheads one may
discover in Spring in glens up the Hudson. The war left the North triumphant and
exhausted and the South subjected and paralyzed. To this day, seventy-eight
years after Appomatox, the effects are visible in great tracts of the country,
where the bloody shirt is still waved. The conquerors, unchecked by Lincoln's
even hand, could hardly be described as generous. The conquered dressed their
wounds as they might. Each side had its special mythology, invariably
unflattering to the other. As late as 1910 there were Southerners who believed
that Lincoln was a sinister and adroit tyrant and were not apt to be persuaded
of the contrary. Many Northerners thought and still think of Southerners as
slack and bad-tempered persons quite mad on the negro question and 'States
Rights'. We hope this mutual intolerance grows less with time, but it is at
least as deep-seated as religious prejudice and no easier to overcome. In some
strange way a man in his late twenties was able to look at the origins and
consequences of the War at once objectively and passionately, from both sides
and for the sake of both. For Stephen Benét the ghastly struggle was 'doing and
suffering' that meant far more to him than any philosophy or other interest.
This he was able to make clear to others. And as one considers his epic, one
hardly knows which to admire most, the kindness, the beauty, or the
understanding.
Histories of the Civil War we have had _ad nauseam. _And they are no
'jewels five-words long' either! But _John Brown's Body _is nearer than
history is apt to get to that veracity which is beyond time. Ruskin's remark
that _The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church _told him more
about the Renaissance than many volumes, is apposite once more. A hundred
passages in _John Brown's Body _light up the surface of events, dulled by
the ceaseless wash of uninspired repetition, as ultraviolet light brings out
unfamiliar flame from a weathered quartz pebble whose inward crystal is suddenly
apparent to the most unimaginative. The easy conversational verse meanders
along, tautening unexpectedly and in a flash into the fiery and inevitable
episode. John Brown, Lincoln, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant each speaks in his
proper idiom. Touched by the magic hand of chance they become living men, and no
longer steel engravings static in half-forgotten histories. The lesser figures
who carry the story forward in their splendor or misery--the southern
professional beauty, the Black Horse Troop aristocrats, the bewildered New
England volunteer, the girl of the great plantation, the girl calling hogs in
the wilderness (what an occupation for a heroine!), the Kentucky hill-billy, the
Pennsylvania farmer-soldier, the Union Spy, the fugitive slave--come before us
in a succession of incandescent contrasts with a reality beyond accepted
versions of the event known to all Americans and not unnaturally ignored by
them. The actual emerges from the Bermuda Deep of the unhappy and far off, the
thing as it was, the form and pressure.
Every rereading of the book reveals something notable one had failed to note,
some correspondence, some piece of 'psychological counterpoint'. This is a
normal experience when works of magnitude are examined. 'One is never through
reading them.' As the saying runs, pick up Sterne tomorrow and he will surprise
you again. Run through _Hamlet _once more and discover what you never
dreamed in a phrase so familiar that you had quoted it yourself dozens of times.
It has been properly said that it is one of the qualities of great writing to
seem for ever full of novelty though never so familiar. And beyond peradventure
_John Brown's Body _has this quality.
It is perhaps not necessary to dwell on a point which the English reader will
probably discover for himself, but it may be mentioned in passing. _Don
Quixote, _the experts say, contains everything that is Spain. Not a sentence,
we are told, but indicates a native slant and habit of thought, echoes or
perhaps mocks the proverbial, reveals local idiosyncrasy, alludes to and plays
on the national character that makes a Spaniard. Something of the kind might
appropriately be said of Stephen Benét's epic. Some State Department official is
alleged to have given the book to a European diplomat as a short cut to
understanding what we are like. If the story is true, that official was more
acute than the generality of his brethren. For everything we are is somewhere in
_John Brown's Body_--our heroisms and our shames, our valiant and our
cowards, our little and our great, and our men and women, our dreams, our
emotions. But I am perfectly willing to let the book speak for us in living
poetry no critic can anatomize, poetry that is read by learned men in their
studies and Red Indians in mountain camps.
This is not the place to speak at length of Stephen Benét's other work: of
his novels, less substantial perhaps than most of his performance; of his many
short stories, of which a number, particularly _The Devil and Daniel Webster
_and _Johnny Pye and the Fool Killer, _seem to have escaped from the
category of the merely contemporary; of his superb poems, like _The Mountain
Whippoorwill, _or of the majestic fragment _Western Star _which was to
be prolegomena to the epic of western migration now lost to us for ever. It
remains rather to speak a little of the personality and nature of the man who
wrote these things.
Physically Stephen Benét was a rather odd looking man, roundheaded,
round-shouldered. His sister-in-law, Elinor Wylie, called him 'a cherub in armor',
the armor no doubt being his mind. Certainly, despite a constitutional leanness,
he had something of the cherubic in his appearance, which I do not think was
particularly impressive until you spoke to him. Then you were immediately aware
of the quiet intelligence and exciting gaiety in his dark, peering,
short-sighted eyes. They had a look as if he were playing in his mind. He was.
For, as many noted, he was like Browning's imagined poet: 'you felt he saw'. And
again like Browning's poet, there was nothing prying or unkind in his steady
scrutiny. He was merely taking stock of 'the diversity of Allah's creatures'. It
was his métier. And it was why people liked him so much. For everyone rightly
divined that his was a legitimate, systematic and wholly intelligent interest.
One doesn't encounter that so frequently that one can afford to ignore it.
During his last years he suffered severely from some arthritic trouble which
made every motion slow and languid. But pain never killed his interest--or his
gaiety. And at any gathering of friends he was invariably, a bright center of
strangely catalytic mirth, that made you think of an unorthodox but diverting
Buddha.
He was humorous rather than witty, though he could be as epigrammatic as the
next man when occasion arose, and it was ill to attempt a score at his expense.
His forte was the illumination of what Doctor Johnson called anfractuosity, his
own and other men's. It was observed that his fame amused him, as a mild
anecdote which he himself related to me may indicate. A battery of cameras was
trained on the Benét family as they came down the gangplank from the third-class
of the _Ile de France _on their return from France. Stephen Benét heard the
chief photographer ask a reporter, 'What are they shooting the guy for?' 'Why,'
said the reporter, gently explanatory, 'He's the author of _John Brown's
Body.' _'Yes, I know, but what are they shooting him for?' Something like
that would make him happy for a week. His enjoyment of the reduction of
self-importance was an essential element in his nature. Yet when he deflated a
person or an idea, he never seemed to injure personal dignity. At the same time
he was a magnificent hater, implacable and determined in a manner to astonish
anyone who misinterpreted his habitual gentleness.
He did not seem to be aware of the incredible breadth of his information,
which was Gargantuan, but even more striking was his catholicity and the kind
wisdom of his judgment. Scores of younger and older writers were the
beneficiaries of this wisdom. And you never talked with him about a book or a
man without feeling that you had consulted an oracle that was Delphic without
being pompous. Wisdom is hard to attain and harder to describe, but he had it
and in some unobtrusive manner was able to convey it to others, if they could
take it. It has been said that such wisdom is best transmitted by indirection.
At any rate, by allusion, 'by the phrase cut short in the middle, by some
adverbial modification', Stephen Benét was able to persuade or suggest and for
most of too short a life was guide and philosopher to a hundred friends in a
thousand connections.
The fact is that the odd-looking man, who was so unpretentious, so gentle, so
amusing, had an attribute which I for one should call greatness, though such a
statement would not have pleased him. It is not too much to say that one reason
he wrote so well of Lincoln was that he had his Lincoln streak. The quality was
in him beyond any literary tact or poetic taste. And it helps to explain why in
writing of heroic men at tragic junctures Stephen Benét never declines into that
hushed, mawkish, reverential, semi-religious tone that characterizes the many
who failed where he succeeded. He knew greatness from the inside and could write
of it with a fellow feeling--even for its weakness.
His death in March 1943, at a moment of national crisis, was like a great
defeat for men and women of good will throughout the United States. Somehow he
had gathered our aspirations into himself and had so become himself symbolic.
The voice still speaks to us like a trumpet, but there was much more that it lay
in him to utter among the captains and the shouting. And it would have been good
to hear.
LEONARD BACON
Peace Dale
Rhode Island
September 1943
To
MY MOTHER
and to the memory of
MY FATHER
INVOCATION
American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land,
As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.
Swift runner, never captured or subdued,
Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,
That half a hundred hunters have pursued
But never matched their bullets with the dream,
Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry
And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.
You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost
With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,
The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,
The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,
And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns
Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,
The grey Maine rocks--and the war-painted dawns
That break above the Garden of the Gods.
The prairie-schooners crawling toward the ore
And the cheap car, parked by the station-door.
Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes
Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth
You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,
And you are ruined gardens in the South
And bleak New England farms, so winter-white
Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep
The middle grainland where the wind of night
Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.
A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag
With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.
They tried to fit you with an English song
And clip your speech into the English tale.
But, even from the first, the words went wrong,
The catbird pecked away the nightingale.
The homesick men begot high-cheekboned things
Whose wit was whittled with a different sound
And Thames and all the rivers of the kings
Ran into Mississippi and were drowned.
They planted England with a stubborn trust.
But the cleft dust was never English dust.
Stepchild of every exile from content
And all the disavouched, hard-bitten pack
Shipped overseas to steal a continent
With neither shirts nor honor to their back.
Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide,
Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square,
Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride,
Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,
The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vain
To make you God and France or God and Spain.
These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth.
And each one married with a dream so proud
He never knew it could not be the truth
And that he coupled with a girl of cloud.
And now to see you is more difficult yet
Except as an immensity of wheel
Made up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweat
And glittering with the heat of ladled steel.
All these you are, and each is partly you,
And none is false, and none is wholly true.
So how to see you as you really are,
So how to suck the pure, distillate, stored
Essence of essence from the hidden star
And make it pierce like a riposting sword.
For, as we hunt you down, you must escape
And we pursue a shadow of our own
That can be caught in a magician's cape
But has the flatness of a painted stone.
Never the running stag, the gull at wing,
The pure elixir, the American thing.
And yet, at moments when the mind was hot
With something fierier than joy or grief,
When each known spot was an eternal spot
And every leaf was an immortal leaf,
I think that I have seen you, not as one,
But clad in diverse semblances and powers,
Always the same, as light falls from the sun,
And always different, as the differing hours.
Yet, through each altered garment that you wore,
The naked body, shaking the heart's core.
All day the snow fell on that Eastern town
With its soft, pelting, little, endless sigh
Of infinite flakes that brought the tall sky down
Till I could put my hands in the white sky
And taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongue
And walk in such a changed and luminous light
As gods inhabit when the gods are young.
All day it fell. And when the gathered night
Was a blue shadow cast by a pale glow
I saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow.
And I have seen and heard you in the dry
Close-huddled furnace of the city street
When the parched moon was planted in the sky
And the limp air hung dead against the heat.
I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant,
Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound,
Enormous metal, shaking to the chant
Of a triphammer striking iron ground.
Enormous power, ugly to the fool,
And beautiful as a well-handled tool.
These, and the memory of that windy day
On the bare hills, beyond the last barbed wire,
When all the orange poppies bloomed one way
As if a breath would blow them into fire,
I keep forever, like the sea-lion's tusk
The broken sailor brings away to land,
But when he touches it, he smells the musk,
And the whole sea lies hollow in his hand.
So, from a hundred visions, I make one,
And out of darkness build my mocking sun.
And should that task seem fruitless in the eyes
Of those a different magic sets apart
To see through the ice-crystal of the wise
No nation but the nation that is Art,
Their words are just. But when the birchbark-call
Is shaken with the sound that hunters make
The moose comes plunging through the forest-wall
Although the rifle waits beside the lake.
Art has no nations--but the mortal sky
Lingers like gold in immortality.
This flesh was seeded from no foreign grain
But Pennsylvania and Kentucky wheat,
And it has soaked in California rain
And five years tempered in New England sleet
To strive at last, against an alien proof
And by the changes of an alien moon,
To build again that blue, American roof
Over a half-forgotten battle-tune
And call unsurely, from a haunted ground,
Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound.
In your Long House there is an attic-place
Full of dead epics and machines that rust,
And there, occasionally, with casual face,
You come awhile to stir the sleepy dust;
Neither in pride not mercy, but in vast
Indifference at so many gifts unsought,
The yellowed satins, smelling of the past,
And all the loot the lucky pirates brought.
I only bring a cup of silver air,
Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.
Receive the dream too haughty for the breast,
Receive the words that should have walked as bold
As the storm walks along the mountain-crest
And are like beggars whining in the cold.
The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill,
The patchwork colors, fading from the first,
And all the fire that fretted at the will
With such a barren ecstasy of thirst.
Receive them all--and should you choose to touch them
With one slant ray of quick, American light,
Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,
Even the worst will glitter in the night.
If not--the dry bones littered by the way
May still point giants toward their golden prey.
PRELUDE--THE SLAVER
He closed the Bible carefully, putting it down
As if his fingers loved it.
Then he turned.
"Mr. Mate."
"Yes, sir."
The captain's eyes held a shadow.
"I think, while this weather lasts," he said, after a pause,
"We'd better get them on deck as much as we can.
They keep better that way. Besides," he added, unsmiling,
"She's begun to stink already. You've noticed it?"
The mate nodded, a boyish nod of half-apology,
"And only a week out, too, sir."
"Yes," said the skipper.
His eyes looked into themselves. "Well. The trade," he said,
"The trade's no damn perfume-shop." He drummed with his fingers.
"Seem to be quiet to-night," he murmured at last.
"Oh yes sir, quiet enough." The mate flushed. "Not
What you'd call quiet at home but--quiet enough."
"Um," said the skipper. "What about the big fellow?"
"Tarbarrel, sir? The man who says he's a king?
He was praying to something--it made the others restless.
Mr. Olsen stopped it."
"I don't like that," said the skipper.
"It was only an idol, sir."
"Oh."
"A stone or something."
"Oh."
"But he's a bad one, sir--a regular sullen one--
He--eyes in the dark--like a cat's--enough to give you--"
The mate was young. He shivered. "The creeps," he said.
"We've had that kind," said the skipper. His mouth was hard
Then it relaxed. "Damn cheating Arabe!" he said,
"I told them I'd take no more of their pennyweight kings,
Worth pounds to look at, and then when you get them aboard
Go crazy so they have to be knocked on the head
Or else just eat up their hearts and die in a week
Taking up room for nothing."
The mate hardly heard him, thinking of something else.
"I'm afraid we'll lose some more of the women," he said.
"Well, they're a scratch lot," said the skipper, "Any sickness?"
"Just the usual, sir."
"But nothing like plague or--"
"No sir."
"The Lord is merciful," said the skipper.
His voice was wholly sincere--an old ship's bell
Hung in the steeple of a meeting-house
With all New England and the sea's noise in it.
"Well, you'd better take another look-see, Mr. Mate."
The mate felt his lips go dry. "Aye aye, sir," he said,
Wetting his lips with his tongue. As he left the cabin
He heard the Bible being opened again.
Lantern in hand, he went down to the hold.
Each time he went he had a trick of trying
To shut the pores of his body against the stench
By force of will, by thinking of salt and flowers,
But it was always useless.
He kept thinking:
When I get home, when I get a bath and clean food,
When I've gone swimming out beyond the Point
In that cold green, so cold it must be pure
Beyond the purity of a dissolved star,
When I get my shore-clothes on, and one of those shirts
Out of the linen-closet that smells of lavender,
Will my skin smell black even then, will my skin smell black?
The lantern shook in his hand.
This was black, here,
This was black to see and feel and smell and taste,
The blackness of black, with one weak lamp to light it
As ineffectually as a firefly in Hell,
And, being so, should be silent.
But the hold
Was never silent.
There was always that breathing.
Always that thick breathing, always those shivering cries.
A few of the slaves
Knew English--at least the English for water and Jesus.
"I'm dying." "Sick." "My name Caesar."
Those who knew
These things, said these things now when they saw the lantern
Mechanically, as tamed beasts answer the whipcrack.
Their voices beat at the light like heavy moths.
But most made merely liquid or guttural sounds
Meaningless to the mate, but horribly like
The sounds of palateless men or animals trying
To talk through a human throat.
The mate was used
To the confusion of limbs and bodies by now.
At first it had made him think of the perturbed
Blind coil of blacksnakes thawing on a rock
In the bleak sun of Spring, or Judgment Day
Just after the first sounding of the trump
When all earth seethes and crumbles with the slow
Vast, mouldy resurrection of the dead.
But he had passed such fancies.
He must see
As much as he could. He couldn't see very much.
They were too tightly packed but--no plague yet,
And all the chains were fast. Then he saw something.
The woman was asleep but her baby was dead.
He wondered whether to take it from her now.
No, it would only rouse the others. Tomorrow.
He turned away with a shiver.
His glance fell
On the man who said he had been a king, the man
Called Tarbarrel, the image of black stone
Whose eyes were savage gods.
The huge suave muscles
Rippled like stretching cats as he changed posture,
Magnificence in chains that yet was ease.
The smolder in those eyes. The steady hate.
The mate made himself stare till the eyes dropped.
Then he turned back to the companionway.
His forehead was hot and sweaty. He wiped it off,
But then the rough cloth of his sleeve smelt black.
The captain shut the Bible as he came in.
"Well, Mister Mate?"
"All quiet, sir."
The captain
Looked at him sharply. "Sit down," he said in a bark.
The mate's knees gave as he sat. "It's--hot down there,"
He said, a little weakly, wanting to wipe
His face again, but knowing he'd smell that blackness
Again, if he did.
"Takes you that way, sometimes,"
Said the captain, not unkindly, "I remember
Back in the twenties."
Something hot and strong
Bit the mate's throat. He coughed.
"There," said the captain.
Putting the cup down. "You'll feel better now.
You're young for this trade, Mister, and that's a fact."
The mate coughed and didn't answer, much too glad
To see the captain change back to himself
From something made of steam, to want to talk.
But, after a while, he heard the captain talking,
Half to himself.
"It's a fact, that," he was saying,
"They've even made a song of me--ever heard it?"
The mate shook his head, quickly, "Oh yes you have.
You know how it goes." He cleared his throat and hummed:
_"Captain Ball was a Yankee slaver,
Blow, blow, blow the man down!
He traded in niggers and loved his Saviour,
Give me some time to blow the man down."_
The droning chanty filled the narrow cabin
An instant with grey Massachusetts sea,
Wave of the North, wave of the melted ice,
The hard salt-sparkles on the harder rock.
The stony islands.
Then it died away.
"Well," said the captain, "if that's how it strikes them--
They mean it bad but I don't take it bad.
I get my sailing-orders from the Lord."
He touched the Bible. "And it's down there, Mister,
Down there in black and white--the sons of Ham--
Bondservants--sweat of their brows." His voice trailed off
Into texts. "I tell you, Mister," he said fiercely,
"The pay's good pay, but it's the Lord's work, too.
We're spreading the Lord's seed--spreading his seed--"
His hand made the outflung motion of a sower
And the mate, staring, seemed to hear the slight
Patter of fallen seeds on fertile ground,
Black, shining seeds, robbed from a black king's storehouse,
Falling and falling on American earth
With light, inexorable patter and fall,
To strike, lie silent, quicken.
Till the Spring
Came with its weeping rains, and the ground bore
A blade, a shadow-sapling, a tree of shadow,
A black-leaved tree whose trunk and roots were shadow,
A tree shaped like a yoke, growing and growing
Until it blotted all the seamen's stars.
Horses of anger trampling, horses of anger,
Trampling behind the sky in ominous cadence,
Beat of the heavy hooves like metal on metal,
Trampling something down. . . .
Was it they, was it they?
Or was it cold wind in the leaves of the shadow-tree
That made such grievous music?
Oh Lordy Je-sus
Won't you come and find me?
They put me in jail, Lord,
Way down in the jail.
Won't you send me a pro-phet
Just one of your prophets
Like Moses and Aaron
To get me some bail?
I'm feeling poorly
Yes, mighty poorly,
I ain't got no strength, Lord,
I'm all trampled down.
So send me an angel
Just any old angel
To give me a robe, Lord,
And give me a crown.
Oh Lordy Je-sus
It's a long time comin'
It's a long time co-o-min'
That Jubilee time.
We'll wait and we'll pray, Lord,
We'll wait and we'll pray, Lord,
But it's a long time, Lord,
Yes, it's a long time.
The dark sobbing ebbed away.
The captain was still talking. "Yes," he said,
"And yet we treat 'em well enough. There's no one
From Salem to the Guinea Coast can say
They lose as few as I do." He stopped.
"Well, Mister?"
The mate arose. "Good night sir and--"
"Goodnight"
The mate went up on deck. The breeze was fresh.
There were the stars, steady. He shook himself
Like a dog coming out of water and felt better.
Six weeks, with luck, and they'd be back in port
And he could draw his pay and see his girl.
Meanwhile, it wasn't his watch, so he could sleep.
The captain still below, reading that Bible. . . .
Forget it--and the noises, still half-heard--
He'd have to go below to sleep, this time,
But after, if the weather held like this,
He'd have them sling a hammock up on deck.
You couldn't smell the black so much on deck
And so you didn't dream it when you slept.
BOOK ONE
Jack Ellyat had been out all day alone,
Except for his new gun and Ned, the setter,
The old wise dog with Autumn in his eyes,
Who stepped the fallen leaves so delicately
They barely rustled. Ellyat trampled them down
Crackling, like cast-off skins of fairy snakes.
He'd meant to hunt, but he had let the gun
Rest on his shoulder.
It was enough to feel
The cool air of the last of Indian summer
Blowing continually across his cheek
And watch the light distill its water of gold
As the sun dropped.
Here was October, here
Was ruddy October, the old harvester,
Wrapped like a beggared sachem in a coat
Of tattered tanager and partridge feathers,
Scattering jack-o-lanterns everywhere
To give the field-mice pumpkin-colored moons.
His red clay pipe had trailed across the land
Staining the trees with colors of the sumach:
East, West, South, North, the ceremonial fume
Blue and enchanted as the soul of air
Drifted its incense.
Incense of the wild,
Incense of earth fulfilled, ready to sleep
The stupefied dark slumber of the bear
All winter, underneath a frozen star.
Jack Ellyat felt that turning of the year
Stir in his blood like drowsy fiddle-music
And knew he was glad to be Connecticut-born
And young enough to find Connecticut winter
Was a black pond to cut with silver skates
And not a scalping-knife against the throat.
He thought the thoughts of youth, idle and proud.
Since I was begotten
My father's grown wise
But he has forgotten
The wind in the skies.
I shall not grow wise.
Since I have been growing
My uncle's got rich.
He spends his time sowing
A bottomless ditch.
I will not grow rich.
For money is sullen
And wisdom is sly,
But youth is the pollen
That blows through the sky
And does not ask why.
O wisdom and money
How can you requite
The honey of honey
That flies in that flight?
The useless delight?
So, with his back against a tree, he stared
At the pure, golden feathers in the West
Until the sunset flowed into his heart
Like a slow wave of honey-dropping dew
Murmuring from the other side of Sleep.
There was a fairy hush
Everywhere. Even the setter at his feet
Lay there as if the twilight had bewitched
His russet paws into two russet leaves,
A dog of russet leaves who did not stir a hair.
Then something broke the peace.
Like wind it was, the flutter of rising wind,
But then it grew until it was the rushing
Of winged stallions, distant and terrible,
Trampling beyond the sky.
The hissing charge
Of lightless armies of angelic horse
Galloping down the stars.
There were no words
In that implacable and feathery thunder,
And yet there must have been, or Ellyat's mind
Caught them like broken arrows out of the air.
Thirteen sisters beside the sea,
(Have a care, my son.)
Builded a house called Liberty
And locked the doors with a stately key.
None should enter it but the free.
(Have a care, my son.)
The walls are solid as Plymouth Rock.
(Rock can crumble, my son.)
The door of seasoned New England stock.
Before it a Yankee fighting-cock.
Pecks redcoat kings away from the lock.
(Fighters can die, my son.)
The hearth is a corner where sages sit.
(Sages pass, my son.)
Washington's heart lies under it.
And the long roof-beams are chiseled and split
From hickory tough as Jackson's wit.
(Bones in the dust, my son.)
The trees in the garden are fair and fine.
(Trees blow down, my son.)
Connecticut elm and Georgia pine.
The warehouse groans with cotton and swine.
The cellar is full of scuppernong-wine.
(Wine turns sour, my son.)
Surely a house so strong and bold,
(The wind is rising, my son,)
Will last till Time is a pinch of mould!
There is a ghost, when the night is old.
There is a ghost who walks in the cold.
(The trees are shaking, my son.)
The sisters sleep on Liberty's breast,
(The thunder thunders, my son,)
Like thirteen swans in a single nest.
But the ghost is naked and will not rest
Until the sun rise out of the West.
(The lightning lightens, my son.)
All night long like a moving stain,
(The trees are breaking, my son,)
The black ghost wanders his house of pain.
There is blood where his hand has lain.
It is wrong he should wear a chain.
(The sky is falling, my son.)
The warning beat at his mind like a bird and passed.
Ellyat roused. He thought: they are going South.
He stared at the sky, confused. It was empty and bleak.
But still he felt the shock of the hooves on his heart.
--The riderless horses never bridled or tamed--
He heard them screaming like eagles loosed from a cloud
As they drove South to trample the indolent sun,
And darkness set in his mind like a shadow enthroned.
He could not read the riddle their flight had set
But he felt wretched, and glad for the dog's cold nose
That now came nuzzling his hand.
Who has set you free?
Who has driven you out in the sky with an iron whip
Like blind, old thunders stubbornly marching abreast
To carry a portent high on shoulders of stone
The length and breadth of the Union?
The North and South are at peace and the East and West,
The tomahawk is buried in prairie-sod.
The great frontier rolls westward with the sun,
And the new States are crowding at the door,
The buckskin-States, the buffalo-horned, the wild
Mustangs with coats the color of crude gold.
Their bodies, naked as the hunter's moon,
Smell of new grass and the sweet milk of the corn.
Defiant virgins, fiercely unpossessed
As the bird-stars that walk the night untrodden.
They drag their skies and sunsets after them
Like calico ponies on a rawhide rope,
And who would ride them must have iron thighs
And a lean heart, bright as a bowie-knife.
Were they not foaled with treasure in their eyes
Between the rattlesnake and the painted rock?
Are they not matches for vaquero gods?
Are they not occupation for the strength
Of a whole ruffian world of pioneers?
And must they wait like spayed mares in the rain,
While Carolina and Connecticut
Fight an old quarrel out before a ghost?
So Ellyat talked to his young indignation,
Walking back home with the October moon.
But, even as he mused, he tried to picture
The South, that languorous land where Uncle Toms
Groaned Biblically underneath the lash,
And grinning Topsies mopped and mowed behind
Each honeysuckle vine.
They called them niggers
And cut their ears off when they ran away,
But then they loved their mammies--there was that--
Although they sometimes sold them down the river--
And when the niggers were not getting licked
Or quoting Scripture, they sang funny songs,
By the Swanee river, on the old plantation.
The girls were always beautiful. The men
Wore varnished boots, raced horses and played cards
And drank mint-juleps till the time came round
For fighting duels with their second cousins
Or tar-and-feathering some God-damn Yankee. . . .
The South . . . the honeysuckle . . . the hot sun . . .
The taste of ripe persimmons and sugar-cane . . .
The cloyed and waxy sweetness of magnolias . . .
White cotton, blowing like a fallen cloud,
And foxhounds belling the Virginia hills . . .
And then the fugitive slave he'd seen in Boston,
The black man with the eyes of a tortured horse. . . .
He whistled Ned. What do you think of it, Ned?
We're abolitionists, I suppose, and Father
Talks about Wendell Phillips and John Brown
But, even so, that doesn't have to mean
We'll break the Union up for abolition,
And they can't want to break it up for slavery--
It won't come to real fighting, will it, Ned?
But Ned was busy with a rabbit-track.
There was the town--the yellow window of home.
Meanwhile, in Concord, Emerson and Thoreau
Talked of an ideal state, so purely framed
It never could exist.
Meanwhile, in Boston
Minister Higginson and Dr. Howe
Waited for news about a certain project
That had to do with pikes and Harper's Ferry.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Clay Wingate dreamed.
-----------
Settled more than a hundred year
By the river and county of St. Savier,
The Wingate held their ancestry
As high as Taliaferro or Huger,
Maryland Carroll, Virginia Lee.
They had ill-spelt letters of Albemarle's
And their first grant ran from the second Charles,
Clerkly inscribed upon parchmentries
"To our well-beloved John Wingate, these,"
Though envy hinted the royal mood
Held more of humor than gratitude
And the well-beloved had less applied
To honest John than his tall young bride,
At least their eldest to John's surprise,
Was very like Monmouth about the eyes,
Till his father wondered if every loyalty
Was always so richly repaid by royalty,
But, having long found that the principal question
In a happy life is a good digestion
And the worst stomachic of all is jealousy
He gave up the riddle, and settled zealously
To farming his acres, begetting daughters,
And making a study of cordial waters
Till he died at ninety of pure senility
And was greatly mourned by the local gentility.
John the Second was different cloth.
He had wings--but the wings of the moth.
Courtly, unlucky, clever and wise,
There was a Stuart in his eyes,
A gambler that played against loaded dice.
He could harrow the water and plough the sand,
But he could not do the thing at hand.
A fencing-foil too supple for use,
A racing colt that must run at loose.
And the Wingate acres had slipped away
If it had not been for Elspeth Mackay.
She was his wife, and her heart was bold
As a broad, bright guinea of Border gold.
Her wit was a tartan of colored weather.
Her walk was gallant as Highland heather.
And whatever she had, she held together.
It was she who established on Georgia soil
Wingate honor and Wingate toil
When John and his father's neighbors stood
At swords' points over a county feud
And only ill-fortune and he were friends.
--They prophesied her a dozen ends,
Seeking new ground for a broken man
Where only the deer and the rabbit ran
And the Indian arrow harried both,
But she held her word and she kept her troth,
Cleared the forest and tamed the wild
And gave the breast to the new-born child
While the painted Death went whooping by
--To die at last as she wished to die
In the fief built out of her blood and bone
With her heart for the Hall's foundation-stone.
Deep in her sons, and the Wingate blood,
She stamped her sigil of fortitude.
_Thrift and love for the house and the chief
And a scone on the hob for the son of grief.
But a knife in the ribs for the pleasant thief._
And deep in her sons, when she was gone,
Her words took root, and her ghost lived on.
The slow voice haunting the ocean-shell
To counsel the sons of her sons as well.
And it was well for the Wingate line
To have that stiffening set in its spine.
For once in each breeding of Wingate kin
There came a child with an olive skin
And the mouth of Charles, the merry and sad,
And the bright, spoilt charm that Monmouth had.
Luckily seldom the oldest born
To sow the nettle in Wingate corn
And let the cotton blight on its stalk
While he wasted his time in witty talk,
Or worse, in love with no minister handy,
Or feeding a spaniel on nuts and brandy
And taking a melancholy pride
In never choosing the winning side.
Clay Wingate was the last to feel
The prick of that spur of tarnished steel,
Gilt, but crossed with the dubious bar
Of arms won under the bastard's star,
Rowel his mind, at that time or this,
With thoughts and visions that were not his.
A sorrow of laughter, a mournful glamor
And the ghostly stroke of an airy hammer
Shaking his heart with pity and pride
That had nothing to do with the things he eyed.
He was happy and young, he was strong and stout,
His body was hard to weary out.
When he thought of life, he thought of a shout.
But--there was a sword in a blackened sheath,
There was a shape with a mourning wreath:
And a place in his mind was a wrestling-ring
Where the crownless form of an outlawed king
Fought with a shadow too like his own,
And, late or early, was overthrown.
It is not lucky to dream such stuff--
Dreaming men are haunted men.
Though Wingate's face looked lucky enough
To any eye that had seen him then,
Riding back through the Georgia Fall
To the white-pillared porch of Wingate Hall.
Fall of the possum, fall of the 'coon,
And the lop-eared hound-dog baying the moon.
Fall that is neither bitter nor swift
But a brown girl bearing an idle gift,
A brown seed-kernel that splits apart
And shows the Summer yet in its heart,
A smokiness so vague in the air
You feel it rather than see it there,
A brief, white rime on the red clay road
And slow mules creaking a lazy load
Through endless acres of afternoon,
A pine-cone fire and a banjo-tune,
And a julep mixed with a silver spoon.
Your noons are hot, your nights deep-starred,
There is honeysuckle still in the yard,
Fall of the quail and the firefly-glows
And the pot-pourri of the rambler-rose,
Fall that brings no promise of snows . . .
Wingate checked on his horse's rein
With a hand as light as a butterfly
And drank content in body and brain
As he gazed for a moment at the sky.
This was his Georgia, this his share
Of pine and river and sleepy air,
Of summer thunder and winter rain
That spills bright tears on the window-pane
With the slight, fierce passion of young men's grief,
Of the mockingbird and the mulberry-leaf.
For, wherever the winds of Georgia run,
It smells of peaches long in the sun,
And the white wolf-winter, hungry and frore,
Can prowl the North by a frozen door
But here we have fed him on bacon-fat
And he sleeps by the stove like a lazy cat.
Here Christmas stops at everyone's house
With a jug of molasses and green, young boughs,
And the little New Year, the weakling one,
Can lie outdoors in the noonday sun,
Blowing the fluff from a turkey-wing
At skies already haunted with Spring--
Oh Georgia . . . Georgia . . . the careless yield!
The watermelons ripe in the field!
The mist in the bottoms that tastes of fever
And the yellow river rolling forever. . . !
So Wingate saw it, vision or truth,
Through the colored window of his own youth,
Building an image out of his mind
To live or die for, as Fate inclined.
He drank his fill of the air, and then,
Was just about to ride on again
When--what was that noise beyond the sky,
That harry of unseen cavalry
Riding the wind?
His own horse stirred,
Neighing. He listened. There was a word.
He could not hear it--and yet he heard.
It was an arrow from ambush flung,
It was a bell with a leaden tongue
Striking an hour.
He was young
No longer. He and his horse were old,
And both were bound with an iron band.
He slipped from the saddle and tried to stand.
He struck one hand with the other hand.
But both were cold.
------------
The horses, burning-hooved, drove on toward the sea,
But, where they had passed, the air was troubled and sick
Like earth that the shoulder of earthquake heavily stirs.
There was a whisper moving that air all night,
A whisper that cried and whimpered about the house
Where John Brown prayed to his God, by his narrow bed.
------------
JOHN BROWN'S PRAYER
Omnipotent and steadfast God,
Who, in Thy mercy, hath
Upheaved in me Jehovah's rod
And his chastising wrath,
For fifty-nine unsparing years
Thy Grace hath worked apart
To mould a man of iron tears
With a bullet for a heart.
Yet, since this body may be weak
With all it has to bear,
Once more, before Thy thunders speak,
Almighty, hear my prayer.
I saw Thee when Thou did display
The black man and his lord
To bid me free the one, and slay
The other with the sword.
I heard Thee when Thou bade me spurn
Destruction from my hand
And, though all Kansas bleed and burn,
It was at Thy command.
I hear the rolling of the wheels,
The chariots of war!
I hear the breaking of the seals
And the opening of the door!
The glorious beasts with many eyes
Exult before the Crowned.
The buried saints arise, arise
Like incense from the ground!
Before them march the martyr-kings,
In bloody sunsets drest,
_O, Kansas, bleeding Kansas,
You will not let me rest!_
_I hear your sighing corn again,
I smell your prairie-sky,
And I remember five dead men
By Pottawattamie._
Lord God it was a work of Thine,
And how might I refrain?
_But Kansas, bleeding Kansas,
I hear her in her pain._
_Her corn is rustling in the ground,
An arrow in my flesh.
And all night long I staunch a wound
That ever bleeds afresh._
Get up, get up, my hardy sons,
From this time forth we are
No longer men, but pikes and guns
In God's advancing war.
And if we live, we free the slave,
And if we die, we die.
But God has digged His saints a grave
Beyond the western sky.
Oh, fairer than the bugle-call
Its walls of jasper shine!
And Joshua's sword is on the wall
With space beside for mine.
And should the Philistine defend
His strength against our blows,
The God who doth not spare His friend,
Will not forget His foes.
------------
They reached the Maryland bridge of Harper's Ferry
That Sunday night. There were twenty-two in all,
Nineteen were under thirty, three not twenty-one,
Kagi, the self-taught scholar, quiet and cool,
Stevens, the cashiered soldier, Puritan-fathered,
A singing giant, gunpowder-tempered and rash.
Dauphin Thompson, the pippin-cheeked country-boy,
More like a girl than a warrior; Oliver Brown,
Married last year when he was barely nineteen;
Dangerfield Newby, colored and born a slave,
Freeman now, but married to one not free
Who, with their seven children, waited him South,
The youngest baby just beginning to crawl;
Watson Brown, the steady lieutenant, who wrote
Back to his wife,
"Oh, Bell, I want to see you
And the little fellow very much but must wait.
There was a slave near here whose wife was sold South.
They found him hanging in Kennedy's orchard next morning.
I cannot come home as long as such things are done here.
I sometimes think that we shall not meet again."
These were some of the band. For better or worse
They were all strong men.
The bearded faces look strange
In the old daguerreotypes: they should be the faces
Of prosperous, small-town people, good sons and fathers,
Good horse-shoe pitchers, good at plowing a field,
Good at swapping stories and good at praying,
American wheat, firm-rooted, good in the ear.
There is only one whose air seems out of the common,
Oliver Brown. That face has a masculine beauty
Somewhat like the face of Keats.
They were all strong men.
They tied up the watchmen and took the rifle-works.
Then John Brown sent a raiding party away
To fetch in Colonel Washington from his farm.
The Colonel was George Washington's great-grand-nephew,
Slave-owner, gentleman-farmer, but, more than these,
Possessor of a certain fabulous sword
Given to Washington by Frederick the Great.
They captured him and his sword and brought them along
Processionally.
The act has a touch of drama,
Half costume-romance, half unmerited farce.
On the way, they told the Washington slaves they were free,
Or free to fight for their freedom.
The slaves heard the news
With the dazed, scared eyes of cattle before a storm.
A few came back with the band and were given pikes,
And, when John Brown was watching, pretended to mount
A slipshod guard over the prisoners.
But, when he had walked away, they put down their pikes
And huddled together, talking in mourning voices.
It didn't seem right to play at guarding the Colonel
But they were afraid of the bearded patriarch
With the Old Testament eyes.
A little later
It was Patrick Higgins' turn. He was the night-watchman
Of the Maryland bridge, a tough little Irishman
With a canny, humorous face, and a twist in his speech.
He came humming his way to his job.
"Halt!" ordered a voice.
He stopped a minute, perplexed. As he told men later,
"Now I didn't know what 'Halt!' mint, any more
Than a hog knows about a holiday."
There was a scuffle.
He got away with a bullet-crease in his scalp
And warned the incoming train. It was half-past-one.
A moment later, a man named Shepherd Heyward,
Free negro, baggage-master of the small station,
Well-known in the town, hardworking, thrifty and fated,
Came looking for Higgins.
"Halt!" called the voice again,
But he kept on, not hearing or understanding,
Whichever it may have been.
A rifle cracked.
He fell by the station-platform, gripping his belly,
And lay for twelve hours of torment, asking for water
Until he was able to die.
There is no stone,
No image of bronze or marble green with the rain
To Shepherd Heyward, free negro of Harper's Ferry,
And even the books, the careful, ponderous histories,
That turn live men into dummies with smiles of wax
Thoughtfully posed against a photographer's background
In the act of signing a treaty or drawing a sword,
Tell little of what he was.
And yet his face
Grey with pain and puzzled at sudden death
Stares out at us through the bookworm-dust of the years
With an uncomprehending wonder, a blind surprise.
"I was getting along," it says, "I was doing well.
I had six thousand dollars saved in the bank.
It was a good town, a nice town, I liked the folks
And they liked me. I had a good job there, too.
On Sundays I used to dress myself up slick enough
To pass the plate in church, but I wasn't proud
Not even when trashy niggers called me Mister,
Though I could hear the old grannies over their snuff
Mumbling along, 'Look, chile, there goes Shepherd Heyward.
Ain't him fine in he Sunday clo'es--ain't him sassy and fine?
You grow up decent and don't play ball in the street,
And maybe you'll get like him, with a gold watch and chain.'
And then, suddenly--and what was it all about?
Why should anyone want to kill me? Why was it done?"
So the grey lips. And so the hurt in the eyes.
A hurt like a child's, at punishment unexplained
That makes the whole child-universe fall to pieces.
At the time of death, most men turn back toward the child.
Brown did not know at first that the first man dead
By the sword he thought of so often as Gideon's sword
Was one of the race he had drawn that sword to free.
It had been dark on the bridge. A man had come
And had not halted when ordered. Then the shot
And the scrape of the hurt man dragging himself away.
That was all. The next man ordered to halt would halt.
His mind was too full of the burning judgments of God
To wonder who it had been. He was cool and at peace.
He dreamt of a lamb, lying down by a rushing stream.
So the night wore away, indecisive and strange.
The raiders stuck by the arsenal, waiting perhaps
For a great bell of jubilation to toll in the sky,
And the slaves to rush from the hills with pikes in their hands,
A host redeemed, black rescue-armies of God.
It did not happen.
Meanwhile, there was casual firing.
A townsman named Boerley was killed. Meanwhile, the train
Passed over the bridge to carry its wild news
Of abolition-devils sprung from the ground
A hundred and fifty, three hundred, a thousand strong
To pillage Harper's Ferry, with fire and sword.
Meanwhile the whole countryside was springing to arms.
The alarm-bell in Charlestown clanged "Nat Turner has come.'
Nat Turner has come again, all smoky from Hell,
Setting the slave to murder and massacre!"
The Jefferson Guards fell in. There were boys and men.
They had no uniforms but they had weapons.
Old squirrel-rifles, taken down from the wall,
Shot guns loaded with spikes and scraps of iron.
A boy dragged a blunderbuss as big as himself.
They started for the Ferry.
In a dozen
A score of other sleepy, neighboring towns
The same bell clanged, the same militia assembled.
The Ferry itself was roused and stirring with dawn.
And the firing began again.
A queer, harsh sound
In the ordinary streets of that clean, small town,
A desultory, vapid, meaningless sound.
God knows why John Brown lingered! Kagi, the scholar,
Who, with two others, held the rifle-works,
All morning sent him messages urging retreat.
They had the inexorable weight of common sense
Behind them, but John Brown neither replied
Nor heeded, brooding in the patriarch-calm
Of a lean, solitary pine that hangs
On the cliff's edge, and sees the world below
A tiny pattern of toy fields and trees,
And only feels its roots gripping the rock
And the almighty wind that shakes its boughs,
Blowing from eagle-heaven to eagle-heaven.
Of course they were cut off. The whole attempt
Was fated from the first.
Just about noon
The Jefferson Guards took the Potomac Bridge
And drove away the men Brown posted there.
There were three doors of possible escape
Open to Brown. With this the first slammed shut.
The second followed it a little later
With the recapture of the other bridge
That cut Brown off from Kagi and the arsenal
And penned the larger body of the raiders
In the armory.
Again the firing rolled,
And now the first of the raiders fell and died,
Dangerfield Newby, the freed Scotch-mulatto
Whose wife and seven children, slaves in Virginia,
Waited for him to bring them incredible freedom.
They were sold South instead, after the raid.
His body lay where the townspeople could reach it.
They cut off his ears for trophies.
If there are souls,
As many think that there are or wish that there might be,
Crystalline things that rise on light wings exulting
Out of the spoilt and broken cocoon of the body,
Knowing no sorrow or pain but only deliverance,
And yet with the flame of speech, the patterns of memory,
One wonders what the soul of Dangerfield Newby
Said, in what terms, to the soul of Shepherd Heyward,
Both born slave, both freed, both dead the same day.
What do the souls that bleed from the corpse of battle
Say to the tattered night?
Perhaps it is better
We have no power to visage what they might say.
The firing now was constant, like the heavy
And drumming rains of summer. Twice Brown sent
Asking a truce. The second time there went
Stevens and Watson Brown with a white flag.
But things had gone beyond the symbol of flags.
Stevens, shot from a window, fell in the gutter
Horribly wounded. Watson Brown crawled back
To the engine house that was the final fort
Of Brown's last stand, torn through and through with slugs.
A Mr. Brua, one of Brown's prisoners,
Strolled out from the unguarded prison-room
Into the bullets, lifted Stevens up,
Carried him over to the old hotel
They called the Wager House, got a doctor for him,
And then strolled back to take his prisoner's place
With Colonel Washington and the scared rest.
I know no more than this of Mr. Brua
But he seems curiously American,
And I imagine him a tall, stooped man
A little yellow with the Southern sun,
With slow, brown eyes and a slow way of talking,
Shifting the quid of tobacco in his cheek
Mechanically, as he lifted up
The dirty, bloody body of the man
Who stood for everything he most detested
And slowly carrying him through casual wasps
Of death to the flyspecked but sunny room
In the old hotel, wiping the blood and grime
Mechanically from his Sunday coat,
Settling his black string-tie with big, tanned hands,
And, then, incredibly, going back to jail.
He did not think much about what he'd done
But sat himself as comfortably as might be
On the cold bricks of that dejected guard-room
And slowly started cutting another quid
With a worn knife that had a brown bone-handle.
He lived all through the war and died long after,
This Mr. Brua I see. His last advice
To numerous nephews was "Keep out of trouble,
But if you're in it, chew and don't be hasty,
Just do whatever's likeliest at hand."
I like your way of talking, Mr. Brua,
And if there still are people interested
In cutting literary clothes for heroes
They might do worse than mention your string-tie.
There were other killings that day. On the one side, this,
Leeman, a boy of eighteen and the youngest raider,
Trying to flee from the death-trap of the engine-house
And caught and killed on an islet in the Potomac.
The body lay on a tiny shelf of rock
For hours, a sack of clothes still stung by bullets.
On the other side--Fontaine Beckham, mayor of the town,
Went to look at Heyward's body with Patrick Higgins.
The slow tears crept to his eyes. He was getting old.
He had thought a lot of Heyward. He had no gun
But he had been mayor of the town for a dozen years,
A peaceful, orderly place full of decent people,
And now they were killing people, here in his town,
He had to do something to stop it, somehow or other.
He wandered out on the railroad, half-distraught
And peeped from behind a water-tank at the raiders.
"Squire, don't go any farther," said Higgins, "It ain't safe."
He hardly heard him, he had to look out again.
Who were these devils with horns who were shooting his people?
They didn't look like devils. One was a boy
Smooth-cheeked, with a bright half-dreamy face, a little
Like Sally's eldest.
Suddenly, the air struck him
A stiff, breath-taking blow. "Oh," he said, astonished.
Took a step and fell on his face, shot through the heart.
Higgins watched him for twenty minutes, wanting to lift him
But not quite daring. Then he turned away
And went back to the town.
The bars had been open all day,
Never to better business.
When the news of Beckham's death spread from bar to bar,
It was like putting loco-weed in the whiskey,
The mob came together at once, the American mob,
They mightn't be able to take Brown's last little fort
But there were two prisoners penned in the Wager House.
One was hurt already, Stevens, no fun killing him.
But the other was William Thompson, whole and unwounded,
Caught when Brown tried to send his first flag of truce.
They stormed the hotel and dragged him out to the bridge,
Where two men shot him, unarmed, then threw the body
Over the trestle. It splashed in the shallow water,
But the slayers kept on firing at the dead face.
The carcass was there for days, a riven target,
Barbarously misused.
Meanwhile the armory yard
Was taken by a new band of Beckham's avengers,
The most of Brown's prisoners freed and his last escape cut off.
What need to tell of the killing of Kagi the scholar,
The wounding of Oliver Brown and the other deaths?
Only this remains to be told. When the drunken day
Reeled into night, there were left in the engine-house
Five men, alive and unwounded, of all the raiders.
Watson and Oliver Brown
Both of them hurt to the death, were stretched on the floor
Beside the corpse of Taylor, the young Canadian.
There was no light, there. It was bitterly cold.
A cold chain of lightless hours that slowly fell
In leaden beads between two fingers of stone.
Outside, the fools and the drunkards yelled in the streets,
And, now and then, there were shots. The prisoners talked
And tried to sleep.
John Brown did not try to sleep,
The live coals of his eyes severed the darkness;
Now and then he heard his young son Oliver calling
In the thirsty agony of his wounds, "Oh, kill me!
Kill me and put me out of this suffering!"
John Brown's jaw tightened. "If you must die," he said,
"Die like a man." Toward morning the crying ceased.
John Brown called out to the boy but he did not answer.
"I guess he's dead," said John Brown.
If his soul wept
They were the incredible tears of the squeezed stone.
He had not slept for two days, but he would not sleep.
The night was a chained, black leopard that he stared down,
Erect, on his feet. One wonders what sights he saw
In the cloudy mirror of his most cloudy heart,
Perhaps God clothed in a glory, perhaps himself
The little boy who had stolen three brass pins
And been well whipped for it.
When he was six years old
An Indian boy had given him a great wonder,
A yellow marble, the first he had ever seen.
He treasured it for months but lost it at last,
Boylike. The hurt of the loss took years to heal.
He never quite forgot.
He could see it now,
Smooth, hard and lovely, a yellow, glistening ball,
But it kept rolling away through cracks of darkness
Whenever he tried to catch it and hold it fast.
If he could only touch it, he would be safe,
But it trickled away and away, just out of reach,
There by the wall . . .
Outside the blackened East
Began to tarnish with a faint, grey stain
That caught on the fixed bayonets of the marines.
Lee of Virginia, Light Horse Harry's son,
Observed it broaden, thinking of many things,
But chiefly wanting to get his business done,
A curious, wry, distasteful piece of work
For regular soldiers.
Therefore to be finished
As swiftly and summarily as possible
Before this yelling mob of drunk civilians
And green militia once got out of hand.
His mouth set. Once already he had offered
The honor of the attack to the militia,
Such honor as it was.
Their Colonel had
Declined with a bright nervousness of haste.
"Your men are paid for doing this kind of work.
Mine have their wives and children." Lee smiled briefly,
Remembering that. The smile had a sharp edge.
Well, it was time.
The whooping crowd fell silent
And scattered, as a single man walked out
Toward the engine-house, a letter in his hand.
Lee watched him musingly. A good man, Stuart.
Now he was by the door and calling out.
The door opened a crack.
Brown's eyes were there
Over the cold muzzle of a cocked carbine.
The parleying began, went on and on,
While the crowd shivered and Lee watched it all
With the strict commonsense of a Greek sword
And with the same sure readiness.
Unperceived,
The dawn ran down the valleys of the wind,
Coral-footed dove, tracking the sky with coral . . .
Then, sudden as powder flashing in a pan,
The parleying was done.
The door slammed shut.
The little figure of Stuart jumped aside
Waving its cap.
And the marines came on.
Brown watched them come. One hand was on his carbine.
The other felt the pulse of his dying son.
"Sell your lives dear," he said. The rifle-shots
Rattled within the bricked-in engine-room
Like firecrackers set off in a stone jug,
And there was a harsh stink of sweat and powder.
There was a moment when the door held firm.
Then it was cracked with sun.
Brown fired and missed.
A shadow with a sword leaped through the sun.
"That's Ossawattomie," said the tired voice
Of Colonel Washington.
The shadow lunged
And Brown fell to his knees.
The sword bent double,
A light sword, better for parades than fighting,
The shadow had to take it in both hands
And fairly rain his blows with it on Brown
Before he sank.
Now two marines were down,
The rest rushed in over their comrades' bodies,
Pinning one man of Brown's against the wall
With bayonets, another to the floor.
Lee, on his rise of ground, shut up his watch.
It had been just a quarter of an hour
Since Stuart gave the signal for the storm,
And now it was over.
All but the long dying.
------------
Cudjo, the negro, watched from the pantry
The smooth glissades of the dancing gentry,
His splay-feet tapping in time to the tune
While his broad face beamed like a drunken moon
At candles weeping in crystal sconces,
Waxed floors glowing like polished bronzes,
Sparkles glinting on Royal Worcester
And all the stir and color and luster
Where Miss Louisa and Miss Amanda,
Proud dolls scissored from silver paper,
With hoopskirts wide as the front veranda
And the gypsy eyes of a caged frivolity,
Pointed their toes in a satin caper
To the nonchalant glory of the Quality.
And there were the gentlemen, one and all,
Friends and neighbors of Wingate Hall--
Old Judge Brooke from Little Vermilion
With the rusty voice of a cracked horse-pistol
And manners as stiff as a French cotillion.
Huger Shepley and Wainscott Bristol,
Hawky arrogant sons of anger
Who rode like devils and fought like cocks
And watched, with an ineffable languor
Their spoilt youth tarnish a dicing-box.
The Cazenove boys and the Cotter brothers,
Pepperalls from Pepperall Ride.
Cummings and Crowls and a dozen others,
Every one with a name and a pride.
Sallow young dandies in shirts with ruffles,
Each could dance like a blowing feather,
And each had the voice that Georgia muffles
In the lazy honey of her May weather.
Cudjo watched and measured and knew them,
Seeing behind and around and through them
With the shrewd, dispassionate, smiling eye
Of the old-time servant in days gone by.
He couldn't read and he couldn't write,
But he knew Quality, black or white,
And even his master could not find
The secret place in the back of his mind
Where witch-bones talked to a scarlet rag
And a child's voice spoke from a conjur-bag.
For he belonged to the hidden nation,
The mute, enormous confederation
Of the planted earth and the burden borne
And the horse that is ridden and given corn.
The wind from the brier-patch brought him news
That never went walking in white men's shoes
And the grapevine whispered its message faster
Than a horse could gallop across a grave,
Till, long ere the letter could tell the master,
The doomsday rabbits had told the slave.
He was faithful as bread or salt,
A flawless servant without a fault,
Major-domo of Wingate Hall,
Proud of his white folks, proud of it all.
They might scold him, they might let him scold them,
And he might know things that he never told them,
But there was a bond, and the bond would hold,
On either side until both were cold.
So he didn't judge, though he knew, he knew,
How the yellow babies down by the Slough,
Had a fourth of their blood from old Judge Brooke,
And where Sue Crowl got her Wingate look,
And the whole, mad business of Shepley's Wager,
And why Miss Harriet married the Major.
And he could trace with unerring ease
A hundred devious pedigrees
Of man and horse, from the Squire's Rapscallion
Back to the stock of the Arab stallion,
And the Bristol line through its baffling dozens
Of doubly-removed half-second-cousins,
And found a creed and a whole theology
On the accidents of human geology.
He looked for Clay in the dancing whirl,
There he was, coming down the line,
Hand in hand with a dark, slim girl
Whose dress was the color of light in wine
Sally Dupré from Appleton
Where the blackshawled ladies rock in the sun
And young things labor and old things rule,
A proud girl, taught in a humbling school
That the only daughters of misalliance
Must harden their hearts against defiance
Of all the uncles and all the aunts
Who succour such offspring of mischance
And wash them clean from each sinful intention
With the kindliest sort of incomprehension.
She had the Appleton mouth, it seemed,
And the Appleton way of riding,
But when she sorrowed and if she dreamed,
Something came out from hiding.
She could sew all day on an Appleton hem
And look like a saint in plaster,
But when the fiddles began to play
And her feet beat fast but her heart beat faster
An alien grace inhabited them
And she looked like her father, the dancing-master,
The scapegrace elegant, "French" Dupré,
Come to the South on a luckless day,
With bright paste buckles sewn on his pumps.
A habit of holding the ace of trumps,
And a manner of kissing a lady's hand
Which the county failed to understand.
He stole Sue Appleton's heart away
With eyes that were neither black nor grey,
And broke the heart of the Brookes' best mare
To marry her safely with time to spare
While the horsewhip uncles toiled behind--
He knew his need and she knew her mind.
And the love they had was as bright and brief
As the dance of the gilded maple-leaf,
Till she died in Charleston of childbed fever
Before her looks or his heart could leave her.
It took the flavor out of his drinking
And left him thoughts he didn't like thinking,
So he wrapped his child in the dead girl's shawl
And sent her politely to Uncle Paul
With a black-edged note full of grief and scruples
And half the money he owed his pupils,
Saw that Sue had the finest hearse
That I. O. U.'s could possibly drape her
And elegized her in vile French verse
While his hot tears spotted the borrowed paper.
He still had manners, he tried to recover,
But something went when he buried his lover.
No women with eyes could ever scold him
But he would make places too hot to hold him,
He shrugged his shoulders and kept descending--
Life was a farce, but it needed ending.
The tag-line found him too tired to dread it
And he died as he lived, with an air, on credit,
In his host's best shirt and a Richmond garret,
Talking to shadows and drinking claret.
He passed when Sally was barely four
And the Appleton kindred breathed once more
And, with some fervor, began to try
To bury the bone of his memory
And strictly expunge from his daughter's semblance
All possible traces of a resemblance.
Which system succeeded, to outward view,
As well as most of such systems do
And resulted in mixing a martyr's potions
For "French" Dupré in his daughter's notions.
And slander is sinful and gossip wrong,
But country memories are long,
The Appleton clan is a worthy clan
But we remember the dancing-man.
The girl is pretty, the girl seems wise,
The girl was born with her father's eyes.
She will play with our daughters and know our sons,
We cannot offend the Appletons.
Bristols and Wingates, Shepleys and Crowls,
We wouldn't hurt her to save our souls.
But after all--and nevertheless--
For one has to think--and one must confess--
And one should admit--but one never knows--
So it has gone, and so it goes,
Through the sun and the wind and the rainy weather
Whenever ladies are gathered together,
Till, little by little and stitch by stitch,
The girl is put in her proper niche
With all the virtues that we can draw
For someone else's daughter-in-law,
A girl to be kind to, a girl we're lucky in,
A girl to marry some nice Kentuckian,
Some Alabaman, some Carolinian--
In fact, if you ask me for my opinion,
There are lots of boys in the Northern sections
And some of them have quite good connections--
She looks charming this evening, doesn't she?
If she danced just a little less _dashingly_!
Cudjo watched her as she went by,
"She's got a light foot," thought Cudjo, "Hi!
A light, swif' foot and a talkin' eye!
But you'll need more'n dat, Miss Sally Dupré
Before you proposals with young Marse Clay.
And as soon as de fiddles finish slewin'
Dey's sixteen things I ought to be doin'.
The Major's sure to be wantin' his dram,
We'll have to be cuttin' a second ham,
And dat trashy high-yaller, Parker's Guinea,
Was sayin' some Yankee name Old John Brown
Has raised de Debil back in Virginny
And freed de niggers all over town,
He's friends with de ha'nts and steel won't touch him
But the paterollers is sure to cotch him.
How come he want to kick up such a dizziness!
Nigger-business ain't white-folks' business."
-----------
There was no real moon in all the soft, clouded night,
The rats of night had eaten the silver cheese,
Though here and there a forgotten crumb of old brightness
Gleamed and was blotted.
But there was no real moon,
No bowl of nacre, dripping an old delusive
Stain on the changed, strange grass, making faces strange;
There was only a taste of warm rain not yet fallen,
A wine-colored dress, turned black because of no moon,
--It would have been spangled in moon--and a broadcloth coat,
And two voices talking together, quite softly, quite calmly.
The dance. Such a lovely dance. But you dance so lightly.
Amanda dances so well. But you dance so lightly.
Louisa looks so pretty in pink, don't you think?
Are you fond of Scott? Yes, I'm very fond of Scott.
Elegant extracts from gilt-edged volumes called Keepsakes
And Godey's Lady's Book words.
If I were a girl,
A girl in a Godey's Lady's Book steel-engraving,
I would have no body or legs, no aches or delusions.
I would know what to do. I would marry a man called Mister.
We would live in a steel-engraving, in various costumes
Designed in the more respectable Paris modes,
With two little boys in little plush hats like muffins,
And two little girls with pantalettes to their chins.
I must do that, I think.
But now my light feet know
That they will be tired and burning with all my dancing
Before I cool them in the exquisite coolness
Of water or the cool virginal sheets of virgins,
And a face comes swimming toward me out of black broadcloth
And my heart knocks.
Who are you, why are you here?
Why should you trouble my eyes?
No, Mr. Wingate,
I cannot agree with you on the beauties of Byron.
But why should something melt in the stuff of my hand,
And my voice sound thin in my ears?
This face is a face
Like any other face. Did my mother once
Hear thin blood sing in her ears at a voice called Mister?
And wish for--and not wish for--and when the strange thing
Was consummate, then, and she lay in a coil of darkness,
Did she feel so much changed? What is it to be
A woman?
No, I must live in a steel-engraving.
His voice said. But there was other than his voice.
Something that heard warm rain on unopened flowers
And spoke or tried to speak across swimming blackness
To the slight profile and the wine-colored dress.
Her hair was black. Her eyes might be black or grey.
He could not remember, it irked him not to remember.
But she was just Sally Dupré from Appleton
Only she was not. Only she was a shadow
And a white face--a terrible, white shut face
That looked through windows of inflexible glass
Disdainfully upon the beauties of Byron
And every puppy that ever howled for the moon
To brush warm raindrops across the unopened flower
And so quiet the heart with--what?
But you speak to her aunts.
You are Wingate of Wingate Hall. You are not caught
Like a bee drunk with the smell of honey, the smell of sleep,
In a slight flower of glass whose every petal
Shows eyes one cannot remember as black or grey.
You converse easily on elegant subjects
Suitable for young ladies.
You do not feel
The inexorable stairs of the flesh ascended
By an armed enemy with a naked torch.
This has been felt before, this has been quenched
With fitting casualness in flesh that has
A secret stain of the sun.
It is not a subject
Suitable for the converse of young ladies.
_"My God, My God, why will she not answer the aching?
My God, My God, to lie at her side through the darkness!"_
And yet--is it real--do I really--
The wine-colored dress
Rose. Broadcloth rose and took her back to the dance.
------------
The nickeled lamp threw a wide yellow disk
On the red tablecloth with the tasseled fringes.
Jack Ellyat put his book down with a slight
Impatient gesture.
There was mother, knitting
The same grey end of scarf while Father read
The same unaltered paper through the same
Old-fashioned spectacles with the worn bows.
Jane with one apple-cheek and one enshadowed,
Soundlessly conjugated Latin verbs,
"Amo, amas, amat," through sober lips,
"Amamus, amatis, amant," and still no sound.
He glanced at the clock. On top of it was Phaëton
Driving bronze, snarling horses down the sharp,
Quicksilver, void, careening gulfs of air
Until they smashed upon a black-marble sea.
The round spiked trophy of the brazen sun
Weighed down his chariot with its heavy load
Of ponderous fire.
To be like Phaëton
And drive the trophy-sun!
But he and his horses
Were frozen in their attitude of snarling,
Frozen forever to the tick of a clock.
Not all the broomstick witches of New England
Could break that congealed motion and cast down
The huge sun thundering on the black marble
Of the mantelpiece, streaked with white veins of foam.
If once such things could happen, all could happen,
The snug, safe world crack up like broken candy
And the young rivers, roaring, rush to the sea;
White bulls that caught the morning on their horns
And shook the secure earth until they found
Some better recompense for life than life,
The untamed ghost, the undiminished star.
But it would not happen. Nothing would ever happen.
He had been here, like this, ten thousand times,
He would be here, like this, ten thousand more,
Until at last the little ticks of the clock
Had cooled what had been hot, and changed the thin,
Blue, forking veins across the back of his hand
Into the big, soft veins on Father's hand.
And the world would be snug.
And he would sit
Reading the same newspaper, after dinner,
Through spectacles whose bows were getting worn
While a wife knitted on an endless scarf
And a child slowly formed with quiet lips
"Amo, amas, amat," and still no sound.
And it would be over. Over without having been.
His father turned a creaking page of paper
And cleared his throat, "The _Tribune_ calls," he said,
"Brown's raid the work of a madman. Well, they're right,
But--"
Mrs. Ellyat put her knitting down.
"Are they going to hang him, Will?"
"It looks that way."
"But, Father, when--"
"They have the right, my son,
He broke the law."
"But, Will! You don't believe--"
A little spark lit Mr. Ellyat's eyes.
"I didn't say I thought that he was wrong.
I said they had the right to hang the man,
But they'll hang slavery with him."
A quick pulse
Beat in Jack Ellyat's wrist. Behind his eyes
A bearded puppet creaked upon a rope
And the sky darkened because he was there.
Now it was Mother talking in a strange
Iron-bound voice he'd never heard before.
"I prayed for him in church last Sunday, Will.
I pray for him at home here every night.
I don't know--I don't care--what laws he broke.
I know that he was right. I pray to God
To show the world somehow that he was right
And break these Southern people into knowing!
And I know this--in every house and church,
All through the North--women are praying for him,
Praying for him. And God will hear those prayers."
"He will, my dear," said Mr. Ellyat gently,
"But what will be His answer?"
He took her hand,
Smoothing it for a moment. Then she sighed
And turned back to the interminable scarf.
Jack Ellyat's pulse beat faster.
Women praying,
Praying at night, in every house in the North,
Praying for old John Brown until their knees
Ached with stiff cold.
Innumerable prayers
Inexorably rising, till the dark
Vault of the midnight was so thronged and packed
The wild geese could not arrow through the storm
Of terrible, ascendant, women's prayers. . . .
The clock struck nine, and Phaëton still stood
Frozenly urging on his frozen horses,
But, for a moment, to Jack Ellyat's eyes,
The congealed hoofs had seemed to paw the air
And the bronze car roll forward.
------------
On Saturday, in Southern market towns,
When I was a boy with twenty cents to spend,
The carts began to drift in with the morning,
And, by the afternoon, the slipshod Square
And all Broad Center Street were lined with them;
Moth-eaten mules that whickered at each other
Between the mended shafts of rattletrap wagons,
Mud-spattered buggies, mouldy phaëtons,
And, here and there, an ox-cart from the hills
Whose solemn team had shoulders of rough, white rock,
Innocent noses, black and wet as snailshells,
And that inordinate patience in their eyes.
There always was a Courthouse in the Square,
A cupolaed Courthouse, drowsing Time away
Behind the grey-white pillars of its porch
Like an old sleepy judge in a spotted gown;
And, down the Square, always a languid jail
Of worn, uneven brick with moss in the cracks
Or stone weathered the grey of weathered pine.
The plump jail-master wore a linen duster
In summer, and you used to see him sit
Tilted against the wall in a pine-chair,
Spitting reflectively in the warm dust
While endless afternoons slowly dissolved
Into the longer shadow, the dust-blue twilight.
Higgledy-piggledy days--days that are gone--
The trotters are dead, all the yellow-painted sulkies
Broken for firewood--the old Courthouse grin
Through new false-teeth of Alabama limestone--
The haircloth lap-robe weeps on a Ford radiator--
But I have seen the old Courthouse. I have seen
The flyspecked windows and the faded flag
Over the judge's chair, touched the scuffed walls,
Spat in the monumental brass spittoons
And smelt the smell that never could be aired,
Although one opened windows for a year,
The unforgettable, intangible
Mixture of cheap cigars, worm-eaten books,
Sweat, poverty, negro hair-oil, grief and law.
I have seen the long room packed with quiet men,
Fit to turn mob, if need were, in a flash--
Cocked-pistol men, so lazily attentive
Their easy languor knocked against your ribs
As, hour by hour, the lawyers droned along,
And minute on creeping minute, your cold necknape
Waited the bursting of the firecracker,
The flare of fury.
And yet, that composed fury
Burnt itself out, unflaring--was held down
By a dry, droning voice, a faded flag.
The kettle never boiled, the pistol stayed
At cock but the snake-head hammer never fell. . . .
The little boys climbed down beyond the windows. . . .
So, in the cupolaed Courthouse there in Charlestown,
When the jail-guards had carried in the cot
Where Brown lay like a hawk with a broken back,
I hear the rustle of the moving crowd,
The buzz outside, taste the dull, heavy air,
Smell the stale smell and see the country carts
Hitched in the streets.
For a long, dragging week
Of market-Saturdays the trial went on.
The droning voices rise and fall and rise.
Stevens lies quiet on his mattress, breathing
The harsh and difficult breath of a dying man,
Although not dying then.
Beyond the Square
The trees are dry, but all the dry leaves not fallen--
Yellow leaves falling through a grey-blue dusk,
The first winds of November whirl and scatter them. . . .
Read as you will in any of the books,
The details of the thing, the questions and answers,
How sometimes Brown would walk, sometimes was carried,
At first would hardly plead, half-refused counsel,
Accepted later, made up witness-lists,
Grew fitfully absorbed in his defense,
Only to flare in temper at his first lawyers
And drive them from the case.
Questions and answers,
Wheels creaking in a void.
Sometimes he lay
Quiet upon his cot, the hawk-eyes staring.
Sometimes his fingers moved mechanically
As if at their old task of sorting wool,
Fingertips that could tell him in the dark
Whether the wool they touched was from Ohio
Or from Vermont. They had the shepherd's gift.
It was his one sure talent.
Questions creaking
Uselessly back and forth.
No one can say
That the trial was not fair. The trial was fair,
Painfully fair by every rule of law,
And that it was made not the slightest difference.
The law's our yardstick, and it measures well
Or well enough when there are yards to measure.
Measure a wave with it, measure a fire,
Cut sorrow up in inches, weigh content.
You can weigh John Brown's body well enough,
But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?
He had the shepherd's gift, but that was all.
He had no other single gift for life.
Some men are pasture Death turns back to pasture,
Some are fire-opals on that iron wrist,
Some the deep roots of wisdoms not yet born.
John Brown was none of these,
He was a stone,
A stone eroded to a cutting edge
By obstinacy, failure and cold prayers.
Discredited farmer, dubiously involved
In lawsuit after lawsuit, Shubel Morgan
Fantastic bandit of the Kansas border,
Red-handed murderer at Pottawattomie,
Cloudy apostle, whooped along to death
By those who do no violence themselves
But only buy the guns to have it done,
Sincere of course, as all fanatics are,
And with a certain minor-prophet air,
That fooled the world to thinking him half-great
When all he did consistently was fail.
So far one advocate.
But there is this.
Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself.
Sometimes the earth is torn by something blind.
Sometimes an image that has stood so long
It seems implanted as the polar star
Is moved against an unfathomed force
That suddenly will not have it any more.
Call it the _mores_, call it God or Fate,
Call it Mansoul or economic law,
That force exists and moves.
And when it moves
It will employ a hard and actual stone
To batter into bits an actual wall
And change the actual scheme of things.
John Brown
Was such a stone--unreasoning as the stone,
Destructive as the stone, and, if you like,
Heroic and devoted as such a stone.
He had no gift for life, no gift to bring
Life but his body and a cutting edge,
But he knew how to die.
And yardstick law
Gave him six weeks to burn that hoarded knowledge
In one swift fire whose sparks fell like live coals
On every State in the Union.
Listen now,
Listen, the bearded lips are speaking now,
There are no more guerilla-raids to plan,
There are no more hard questions to be solved
Of right and wrong, no need to beg for peace,
Here is the peace unbegged, here is the end,
Here is the insolence of the sun cast off,
Here is the voice already fixed with night.
JOHN BROWN'S SPEECH
I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say.
In the first place I deny everything but what I have all along
admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves. . . .
Had I interfered in the matter which I admit, and which I admit has
been fairly proved . . . had I so interfered in behalf of the rich,
the powerful, the intelligent, or the so-called great . . . and
suffered and sacrificed, what I have in this interference, it would
have been all right. Every man in this Court would have deemed it an
act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the
New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would
that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them. It teaches
me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I
endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to
understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to
have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I
have done in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right.
Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the
furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with
the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave
country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust
enactments, I say, let it be done.
Let me say one word further. I feel entirely satisfied with the
treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the
circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel
no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my
intention and what was not. I never had any design against the
liberty of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason or incite
slaves to rebel or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged
any man to do so but always discouraged any idea of that kind.
Let me say also, in regard to the statements made by some of those
connected with me, I hear it has been stated by some of them that I
have induced them to join with me. But the contrary is true. I do
not say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness. Not
one but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part at their own
expense. A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of
conversation with, till the day they came to me, and that was for the
purpose I have stated.
Now I have done.
------------
The voice ceased. There was a deep, brief pause.
The judge pronounced the formal words of death.
One man, a stranger, tried to clap his hands.
The foolish sound was stopped.
There was nothing but silence then.
No cries in the court,
No roar, no slightest murmur from the thronged street,
As Brown went back to jail between his guards.
The heavy door shut behind them.
There was a noise of chairs scraped back in the court-room,
And that huge sigh of a crowd turning back into men.
------------
A month between the sentence and the hanging.
A month of endless visitors, endless letters.
A Mrs. Russell came to clean his coat.
A sculptor sketched him.
In the anxious North,
The anxious Dr. Howe most anxiously
Denied all godly connection with the raid,
And Gerrit Smith conveniently went mad
For long enough to sponge his mind of all
Memory of such an unsuccessful deed.
Only the tough, swart-minded Higginson
Kept a grim decency, would not deny.
Pity the portly men, pity the pious,
Pity the fool who lights the powder-mine,
They need your counterfeit penny, they will live long.
In Charlestown meanwhile, there were whispers of rescue.
Brown told them,
"I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live."
And lived his month so, busily.
A month of trifles building up a legend
And letters in a pinched, firm handwriting
Courageous, scriptural, misspelt and terse,
Sowing a fable everywhere they fell
While the town filled with troops.
The Governor came,
Enemies, friends, militia-cavaliers,
Old Border Foes.
The month ebbed into days,
The wife and husband met for the last time,
The last letter was written:
"To be inscribed on the old family Monument at North Elba.
Oliver Brown born 1839 was killed at Harpers Ferry, Va. Nov. 17th
1859
Watson Brown born 1835 was wounded at Harpers Ferry Nov. 17th and
died Nov. 19th 1859
(My Wife can) supply _blank_ dates to above
John Brown born May 9th 1800 was executed at Charlestown Va.
December 2nd 1859."
At last the clear warm day, so slow to come.
The North that had already now begun
To mold his body into crucified Christ's,
Hung fables about those hours--saw him move
Symbolically, kiss a negro child,
Do this and that, say things he never said,
To swell the sparse, hard outlines of the event
With sentimental omen.
It was not so.
He stood on the jail-porch in carpet-slippers,
Clad in a loose ill-fitting suit of black,
Tired farmer waiting for his team to come.
He left one last written message:
"I, John Brown, am now quite _certain_ that the crimes of this _guilty
land: will_ never be purged _away_: but with Blood. I had _as I now
think: vainly_ flattered myself that without _very much_ bloodshed; it
might be done."
They did not hang him in the jail or the Square.
The two white horses dragged the rattling cart
Out of the town. Brown sat upon his coffin.
Beyond the soldiers lay the open fields
Earth-colored, sleepy with unfallen frost.
The farmer's eye took in the bountiful land.
"This _is_ a beautiful country," said John Brown.
The gallows-stairs were climbed, the death-cap fitted.
Behind the gallows,
Before a line of red-and-grey cadets,
A certain odd Professor T. J. Jackson
Watched disapprovingly the ragged militia
Deploy for twelve long minutes ere they reached
Their destined places.
The Presbyterian sabre of his soul
Was moved by a fey breath.
He saw John Brown,
A tiny blackened scrap of paper-soul
Fluttering above the Pit that Calvin barred
With bolts of iron on the unelect;
He heard the just, implacable Voice speak out
"Depart ye wicked to eternal fire."
And sternly prayed that God might yet be moved
To save the predestined cinder from the flame.
Brown did not hear the prayer. The rough black cloth
Of the death-cap hid his eyes now. He had seen
The Blue Ridge Mountains couched in their blue haze.
Perhaps he saw them still, behind his eyes--
Perhaps just cloth, perhaps nothing any more.
_"I shall look unto the hills from whence cometh my help."_
The hatchet cut the cord. The greased trap fell.
_Colonel Preston:_
"So perish all such enemies of Virginia,
All such enemies of the Union,
All such foes of the human race."
------------
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
He will not come again with foolish pikes
And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.
He has gone back North. The slaves have forgotten his eyes.
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
Already the corpse is changed, under the stone,
The strong flesh rotten, the bones dropping away.
Cotton will grow next year, in spite of the skull.
Slaves will be slaves next year, in spite of the bones.
Nothing is changed, John Brown, nothing is changed.
_"There is a song in my bones. There is a song
In my white bones."_
I hear no song. I hear
Only the blunt seeds growing secretly
In the dark entrails of the preparate earth,
The rustle of the cricket under the leaf,
The creaking of the cold wheel of the stars.
_"Bind my white bones together--hollow them
To skeleton pipes of music. When the wind
Blows from the budded Spring, the song will blow."_
I hear no song. I only hear the roar
Of the Spring freshets, and the gushing voice
Of mountain-brooks that overflow their banks,
Swollen with melting ice and crumbled earth.
_"That is my song.
It is made of water and wind. It marches on."_
No, John Brown's body lies a-mouldering,
A-mouldering.
_"My bones have been washed clean
And God blows through them with a hollow sound,
And God has shut his wildfire in my dead heart."_
I hear it now,
Faint, faint as the first droning flies of March,
Faint as the multitudinous, tiny sigh
Of grasses underneath a windy scythe.
_"It will grow stronger."_
It has grown stronger. It is marching on.
It is a throbbing pulse, a pouring surf,
It is the rainy gong of the Spring sky
Echoing,
John Brown's body,
John Brown's body.
But still it is not fierce. I find it still
More sorrowful than fierce.
_"You have not heard it yet. You have not heard
The ghosts that walk in it, the shaking sound."_
Strong medicine,
Bitter medicine of the dead,
I drink you now. I hear the unloosed thing,
The anger of the ripe wheat--the ripened earth
Sullenly quaking like a beaten drum
From Kansas to Vermont. I hear the stamp
Of the ghost-feet. I hear the ascending sea.
"Glory, Glory Hallelujah,
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!"
What is this agony of the marching dust?
What are these years ground into hatchet blades?
_"Ask the tide why it rises with the moon,
My bones and I have risen like that tide
And an immortal anguish plucks us up
And will not hide us till our song is done."_
The phantom drum diminishes--the year
Rolls back. It is only winter still, not spring,
The snow still flings its white on the new grave,
Nothing is changed, John Brown, nothing is changed
John . . . Brown . . .
BOOK TWO
A smoke-stained Stars-and-Stripes droops from a broken toothpick and
ninety tired men march out of fallen Sumter to their ships, drums
rattling and colors flying.
Their faces are worn and angry, their bellies empty and cold, but the
stubborn salute of a gun, fifty times repeated, keeps their backs
straight as they march out, and answers something stubborn and mute in
their flesh.
Beauregard, _beau sabreur_, hussar-sword with the gilded hilt, the
gilded metal of the guard twisted into lovelocks and roses, vain as
Murat, dashing as Murat, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard is a pose
of conquering courtesy under a palmetto-banner. The lugubrious little
march goes grimly by his courtesy, he watches it unsmiling, a light
half-real, half that of invisible footlights on his French, dark,
handsome face.
------------
_The stone falls in the pool, the ripples spread._
The colt in the Long Meadow kicked up his heels.
"That was a fly," he thought, "It's early for flies."
But being alive, in April, was too fine
For flies or anything else to bother a colt.
He kicked up his heels again, this time in pure joy,
And started to run a race with the wind and his shadow.
After the stable stuffiness, the sun.
After the straw-littered boards, the squelch of the turf.
His little hoofs felt lighter than dancing-shoes,
He scared himself with a blue-jay, his heart was a leaf.
He was pure joy in action, he was the unvexed
Delight of all moving lightness and swift-footed pace,
The pride of the flesh, the young Spring neighing and rearing.
Sally Dupré called to him from the fence.
He came like a charge in a spatter of clean-cut clods,
Ears back, eyes wide and wild with folly and youth.
He drew up snorting.
She laughed and brushed at her skirt
Where the mud had splashed it.
"There, Star--there, silly boy!
Why won't you ever learn sense?"
But her eyes were hot,
Her hands were shaking as she offered the sugar
--Long-fingered, appleblossom-shadow hands--
Star blew at the sugar once, then mumbled it up.
She patted the pink nose. "There, silly Star!
That's for Fort Sumter, Star!" How hot her eyes were!
"Star, do you know you're a Confederate horse?
Do you know I'm going to call you Beauregard?"
Star whinnied, and asked for more sugar. She put her hand
On his neck for a moment that matched the new green leaves
And sticky buds of April.
You would have said
They were grace in quietness, seen so, woman and horse....
_The widened ripple breaks against a stone
The heavy noon walks over Chancellorsville
On brazen shoes, but where the squadron rode
Into the ambush, the blue flies are coming
To blow on the dead meat._
Carter, the telegraph-operator, sighed
And propped his eyes awake again.
He was tired.
Dog-tired, stone-tired, body and mind burnt up
With too much poker last night and too little sleep.
He hated the Sunday trick. It was Riley's turn
To take it, but Riley's wife was having a child.
He cursed the child and the wife and Sunday and Riley.
Nothing ever happened at Stroudsburg Siding
And yet he had to be here and keep awake
With the flat, stale taste of too little sleep in his mouth
And wait for nothing to happen.
His bulky body
Lusted for sleep with every muscle and nerve.
He'd rather have sleep than a woman or whiskey or money.
He'd give up the next three women that might occur
For ten minutes' sleep, he'd never play poker again,
He'd--battered face beginning to droop on his hands--
Sleep--women--whiskey--eyelids too heavy to lift--
"Yes, Ma, I said, 'Now I lay me.'"--
The sounder chattered
And his head snapped back with a sharp, neck-breaking jerk.
By God, he'd nearly--_chat--chitter-chatter-chat-chat_--
For a moment he took it in without understanding
And then the vein in his forehead began to swell
And his eyes bulged wide awake.
"By Jesus!" he said,
And stared at the sounder as if it had turned to a snake.
"By Jesus!" he said, "By Jesus, they've done it!" he said.
_The cruelty of cold trumpets wounds the air.
The ponderous princes draw their gauntlets on.
The captains fit their coal-black armor on._
Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew,
Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,
Able, well-hated, face alive with life,
Looked round the council-chamber with the slight
Perpetual smile he held before himself
Continually like a silk-ribbed fan.
Behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind
Weighed Gentiles in an old balance.
There they were.
Toombs, the tall, laughing, restless Georgian,
As fine to look at as a yearling bull,
As hard to manage.
Stephens, sickly and pale,
Sweet-voiced, weak-bodied, ailingly austere,
The mind's thin steel wearing the body out,
The racked intelligence, the crippled charm.
Mallory--Reagan--Walker--at the head
Davis.
The mind behind the silk-ribbed fan
Was a dark prince, clothed in an Eastern stuff,
Whose brown hands cupped about a crystal egg
That filmed with colored cloud. The eyes stared, searching.
"I am the Jew. What am I doing here?
The Jew is in my blood and in my hands,
The lonely, bitter and quicksilver drop,
The stain of myrrh that dyes no Gentile mind
With tinctures out of the East and the sad blare
Of the curled ramshorn on Atonement Day.
A river runs between these men and me,
A river of blood and time and liquid gold,
--Oh white rivers of Canaan, running the night!--
And we are colleagues. And we speak to each other
Across the roar of that river, but no more.
I hide myself behind a smiling fan.
They hide themselves behind a Gentile mask
And, if they fall, they will be lifted up,
Being the people, but if I once fall
I fall forever, like the rejected stone.
That is the Jew of it, my Gentile friends,
To see too far ahead and yet go on
And I can smile at it behind my fan
With a drowned mirth that you would find uncouth.
For here we are, the makeshift Cabinet
Of a new nation, gravely setting down
Rules, precedents and cautions, never once
Admitting aloud the cold, plain Franklin sense
That if we do not hang together now
We shall undoubtedly hang separately.
It is the Jew, to see too far ahead--
I wonder what they're doing in the North,
And how their Cabinet shapes, and how they take
Their railsplitter, and if they waste their time
As we waste ours and Mr. Davis's.
Jefferson Davis, pride of Mississippi,
First President of the Confederate States,
What are you thinking now?
Your eyes look tired.
Your face looks more and more like John Calhoun.
And that is just, because you are his son
In everything but blood, the austere child
Of his ideas, the flower of states-rights.
I will not gird against you, Jefferson Davis.
I sent you a challenge once, but that's forgotten,
And though your blood runs differently from mine,
The Jew salutes you from behind his fan,
Because you are the South he fell in love with
When that young black-haired girl with the Gentile-eyes,
Proud, and a Catholic, and with honey-lips,
First dinted her French heels upon his heart. . . .
We have changed since, but the remembered Spring
Can change no more, even in the Autumn smokes.
We cannot help that havoc of the heart
But my changed mind remembers half the Spring
And shall till winter falls.
No, Jefferson Davis,
You are not she--you are not the warm night
On the bayou, or the New Orleans lamps,
The white-wine bubbles in the crystal cup,
The almond blossoms, sleepy with the sun:
But, nevertheless, you are the South in word,
Deed, thought and temper, the cut cameo
Brittle but durable, refined but fine,
The hands well-shaped, not subtle, but not weak,
The mind set in tradition but not unjust,
The generous slaveholder, the gentleman
Who neither forces his gentility
Nor lets it be held lightly--
and yet, and yet
I think you look too much like John Calhoun,
I think your temper is too brittly-poised,
I think your hands too scholar-sensitive,
And though they say you mingle in your voice
The trumpet and the harp, I think it lacks
That gift of warming men which coarser voices
Draw from the common dirt you tread upon
But do not take in your hands. I think you are
All things except success, all honesty
Except the ultimate honesty of the earth,
All talents but the genius of the sun.
And yet I would not have you otherwise,
Although I see too clearly what you are.
Except--except--oh honeydropping Spring,
Oh black-haired woman with the Gentile eyes!
Tell me, you Gentiles, when your Gentile wives
Pray in the church for you and for the South,
How do they pray?--not in that lulling voice
Where some drowned bell of France makes undertones
To the warm river washing the levee.
You do not have so good a prayer as mine.
You cannot have so good a prayer as mine."
------------
Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field--
Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down
The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers,
And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay
As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine
Plutarchan sentences carved in a Latin bronze;
The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon,
The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician,
State-character but comparative failure at forty
In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars,
Honesty rare as a man without self-pity,
Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind,
And a self-confidence like an iron bar:
This Lincoln, President now by the grace of luck,
Disunion, politics, Douglas and a few speeches
Which make the monumental booming of Webster
Sound empty as the belly of a burst drum,
Lincoln shambled in to the Cabinet meeting
And sat, ungainly and awkward. Seated so
He did not seem so tall nor quite so strange
Though he was strange enough. His new broadcloth suit
Felt tight and formal across his big shoulders still
And his new shiny top-hat was not yet battered
To the bulging shape of the old familiar hat
He'd worn at Springfield, stuffed with its hoard of papers.
He was pretty tired. All week the office-seekers
Had plagued him as the flies in fly-time plague
A gaunt-headed, patient horse. The children weren't well
And Mollie was worried about them so sharp with her tongue.
But he knew Mollie and tried to let it go by.
Men tracked dirt in the house and women liked carpets.
Each had a piece of the right, that was all most people could
stand.
Look at his Cabinet here. There were Seward and Chase,
Both of them good men, couldn't afford to lose them,
But Chase hates Seward like poison and Seward hates Chase
And both of 'em think they ought to be President
Instead of me. When Seward wrote me that letter
The other day, he practically told me so.
I suppose a man who was touchy about his pride
Would send them both to the dickens when he found out,
But I can't do that as long as they do their work.
The Union's too big a horse to keep changing the saddle
Each time it pinches you. As long as you're sure
The saddle fits, you're bound to put up with the pinches
And not keep fussing the horse.
When I was a boy
I remember figuring out when I went to town
That if I had just one pumpkin to bump in a sack
It was hard to carry, but once you could get two pumpkins,
One in each end of the sack, it balanced things up.
Seward and Chase'll do for my pair of pumpkins.
And as for me--if anyone else comes by
Who shows me that he can manage this job of mine
Better than I can--well, he can have the job.
It's harder sweating than driving six cross mules,
But I haven't run into that other fellow yet
And till or supposing I meet him, the job's my job
And nobody else's.
Seward and Chase don't know that.
They'll learn it, in time.
Wonder how Jefferson Davis
Feels, down there in Montgomery, about Sumter.
He must be thinking pretty hard and fast,
For he's an able man, no doubt of that.
We were born less than forty miles apart,
Less than a year apart--he got the start
Of me in age, and raising too, I guess,
In fact, from all you hear about the man,
If you set out to pick one of us two
For President, by birth and folks and schooling,
General raising, training up in office,
I guess you'd pick him, nine times out of ten
And yet, somehow, I've got to last him out.
These thoughts passed through the mind in a moment's flash,
Then that mind turned to business.
It was the calling
Of seventy-five thousand volunteers.
------------
Shake out the long line of verse like a lanyard of woven steel
And let us praise while we can what things no praise can deface,
The corn that hurried so fast to be ground in an iron wheel
The obdurate, bloody dream that slept before it grew base.
Not the silk flag and the shouts, the catchword patrioteers,
The screaming noise of the press, the preachers who howled for blood,
But a certain and stubborn pith in the hearts of the cannoneers
Who hardly knew their guns before they died in the mud.
They came like a run of salmon where the ice-fed Kennebec flings
Its death at the arrow-silver of the packed and mounting host,
They came like the young deer trooping to the ford by Eutaw
Springs,
Their new horns fuzzy with velvet, their coats still rough with the
frost.
North and South they assembled, one cry and the other cry,
And both are ghosts to us now, old drums hung up on a wall,
But they were the first hot wave of youth too-ready to die,
And they went to war with an air, as if they went to a ball.
Dress-uniform boys who rubbed their buttons brighter than gold,
And gave them to girls for flowers and raspberry-lemonade,
Unused to the sick fatigue, the route-march made in the cold,
The stink of the fever camps, the tarnish rotting the blade.
We in our time have seen that impulse going to war
And how that impulse is dealt with. We have seen the circle complete.
The ripe wheat wasted like trash between the fool and the whore.
We cannot praise again that anger of the ripe wheat.
This we have seen as well, distorted and half-forgotten
In what came before and after, where the blind went leading the blind,
The first swift rising of youth before the symbols were rotten,
The price too much to pay, the payment haughty in kind.
So with these men and then. They were much like the men you know,
Under the beards and the strangeness of clothes with a different fit.
They wrote mush-notes to their girls and wondered how it would go,
Half-scared, half-fierce at the thought, but none yet ready to quit.
Georgia, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Maine,
Piney-woods squirrel-hunter and clerk with the brand-new gun,
Thus they were marshalled and drilled, while Spring turned Summer
again,
Until they could stumble toward death at gartersnake-crooked Bull Run.
------------
Wingate sat in his room at night
Between the moon and the candle-light,
Reading his Byron with knitted brows,
While his mind drank in the peace of his house,
It was long past twelve, and the night was deep
With moonlight and silence and wind and sleep,
And the small, dim noises, thousand-fold,
That all old houses and forests hold.
The boards that creak for nothing at all,
The leaf that rustles, the bough that sighs,
The nibble of mice in the wainscot-wall,
And the slow clock ticking the time that dies
All distilled in a single sound
Like a giant breathing underground,
A sound more sleepy than sleep itself.
Wingate put his book on the shelf
And went to the window. It was good
To walk in the ghost through a silver wood
And set one's mettle against the far
Bayonet-point of the fixed North Star.
He stood there a moment, wondering.
_North Star, wasp with the silver sting
Blue-nosed star on the Yankee banners,
We are coming against you to teach you manners!
With crumbs of thunder and wreaths of myrtle
And cannon that dance to a Dixie chorus,
With a song that bites like a snapping-turtle
And the tiger-lily of Summer before us,
To pull you down like a torn bandanna,
And drown you deeper than the Savannah!_
And still, while his arrogance made its cry,
He shivered a little, wondering why.
There was his uniform, grey as ash,
The boots that shone like a well-rubbed table,
The tassels of silk on the colored sash
And sleek Black Whistle down in the stable,
The housewife, stitched from a beauty's fan,
The pocket-Bible with Mother's writing,
The sabre never yet fleshed in man,
And all the crisp new toys of fighting.
He gloated at them with a boyish pride,
But still he wondered, Monmouth-eyed.
The Black Horse Troop was a cavalier
And gallant name for a lady's ear.
He liked the sound and the ringing brag
And the girls who stitched on the county flag,
The smell of horses and saddle-leather
And the feel of the squadron riding together,
From the loose-reined canter of colts at large,
To the crammed, tense second before the charge:
He liked it all with the young, keen zest
Of a hound unleashed and a hawk unjessed.
_And yet--what happened to men in war
Why were they all going out to war?_
He brooded a moment. It wasn't slavery,
That stale red-herring of Yankee knavery
Nor even states-rights, at least not solely,
But something so dim that it must be holy.
A voice, a fragrance, a taste of wine,
A face half-seen in old candleshine,
A yellow river, a blowing dust,
Something beyond you that you must trust,
Something so shrouded it must be great,
The dead men building the living State
From 'simmon-seed on a sandy bottom,
The woman South in her rivers laving
That body whiter than new-blown cotton
And savage and sweet as wild-orange-blossom,
The dark hair streams on the barbarous bosom,
If there ever has been a land worth saving--
_In Dixie land, I'll take my stand,
And live and die for Dixie! . . ._
And yet--and yet--in some cold Northern room,
Does anyone else stare out the obdurate moon
With doubtful passion, seeing his toys of fighting
Scribbled all over with such silver writing
From such a heart of peace, they seem the stale
Cast properties of a dead and childish tale?
And does he see, too soon,
Over the horse, over the horse and rider,
The grey, soft swathing shadowness of the spider,
Spinning his quiet loom?
No--no other man is cursed
With such doubleness of eye,
They can hunger, they can thirst,
But they know for what and why.
I can drink the midnight out,
And rise empty, having dined.
For my courage and my doubt
Are a double strand of mind,
And too subtly intertwined.
They are my flesh, they are my bone,
My shame and my foundation-stone.
I was born alone, to live alone.
Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,
Eyes that are neither black nor grey,
Why do you haunt me, night and day?
Sea-changing eyes, with the deep, drowned glimmer
Of bar-gold crumbling from sunken ships,
Where the