Should be so terrible, if it were not
We might become too fond of it—” and showed
Himself, for once, completely as he lived
In the laconic balance of that phrase;
This man could reason, but he was a fighter,
Skillful in every weapon of defence
But never defending when he could assault,
Taking enormous risks again and again,
Never retreating while he still could strike,
Dividing a weak force on dangerous ground
And joining it again to beat a strong,
Mocking at chance and all the odds of war
With acts that looked like hairbreadth recklessness
—We do not call them reckless, since they won.
We do not see him reckless for the calm
Proportion that controlled the recklessness—
But that attacking quality was there.
He was not mild with life or drugged with justice,
He gripped life like a wrestler with a bull,
Impetuously. It did not come to him
While he stood waiting in a famous cloud,
He went to it and took it by both horns
And threw it down. Oh, he could bear the shifts
Of time and play the bitter loser’s game,
The slow, unflinching chess of fortitude,
But while he had an opening for attack
He would attack with every ounce of strength.
His heart was not a stone but trumpet-shaped
And a long challenge blew an anger through it
That was more dread for being musical
First, last, and to the end. Again he said
A curious thing to life.
“I’m always wanting something.” The brief phrase
Slides past us, hardly grasped in the smooth flow
Of the well-balanced, mildly-humorous prose
That goes along to talk of cats and duties,
Maxims of conduct, farming and poor bachelors,
But for a second there, the marble cracked
And a strange man we never saw before
Showed us the face he never showed the world
And wanted something—not the general
Who wanted shoes and food for ragged men,
Not the good father wanting for his children,
The patriot wanting victory—all the Lees
Whom all the world could see and recognize
And hang with gilded laurels—but the man
Who had, you’d say, all things that life can give
Except the last success—and had, for that,
Such glamor as can wear sheer triumph out,
Proportion’s son and Duty’s eldest sword
And the calm mask who—wanted something still,
Somewhere, somehow and always. Picklock biographers,
What could he want that he had never had?
He only said it once—the marble closed—
There was a man enclosed within that image.
There was a force that tried Proportion’s rule
And died without a legend or a cue
To bring it back. The shadow-Lees still live.
But the first-person and the singular Lee?
The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground
But earth’s too small for something in our earth,
We’ll make a new earth from the summer’s cloud,
From the pure summer’s cloud. It was not that,
It was not God or love or mortal fame.
It was not anything he left undone.
—What does Proportion want that it can lack?
—What does the ultimate hunger of the flesh
Want from the sky more than a sky of air?
He wanted something. That must be enough.
Now he rides Traveller back into the mist.
Continual guns, be silent for a moment,
Be silent, now.
We know your thirst. We hear the roll of your wheels
Crushing down tangled June,
Virginia June,
With tires of iron, with heavy caissons creaking,
Crushing down maidenhair and wilderness-seal,
Scaring the rabbit and the possum-children,
Scaring the redbird and the mockingbird
As McClellan’s army moves forward.
We know your bloody thirst so soon to be slaked
With the red burst-grape juices.
But now, we would have you silent, a little moment,
We would have you hold your peace and point at the moon.
For when you speak, we can hear no sound but your sound,
And we would hear the voices of men and women
For a little while.
Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian,
Shippy, the little man with the sharp rat-eyes,
Luke Breckenridge, the gawky boy from the hills,
Clay Wingate, Melora Vilas, Sally Dupré,
The slaves in the cabins, ragged Spade in the woods,
We have lost these creatures under a falling hammer.
We must look for them now, again.
Jake Diefer is with the assault that comes from the ships,
He has marched, he has fought at Fair Oaks, but he looks the same:
A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man
Who doesn’t think much of the way that they farm down here,
The sun may be good, if you like that sort of sun,
But the barns and the fields are different, they don’t look right,
They don’t look like Pennsylvania. He spits and wonders.
Whenever he can, he reads a short, crumpled letter
And tries to puzzle out from the round, stiff writing
How things are back on the farm. The boy’s a good boy
But the boy can’t do it all, or the woman either.
He knows too much about weather and harvest-hands
—It’s all right fighting the Rebels to save the Union
But they ought to get through with it quicker, now they’ve begun,
They don’t take the way the crops are into account,
You can’t go off and leave a farm like a store,
And you can’t expect a boy to know everything,
Or a hired man. No, sir. He walks along like an ox.
—He’d like to see the boy and the woman again,
Eat pancakes and sleep in a bed and look at the hay—
This business comes first but after it’s finished up—
He can’t say he’s bothered exactly most of the time.
The weather bothers him more than anything.
He knows it’s not the same sort of weather down here,
But every day when he wakes, he looks at the sky
And tries to figure out what it’s like back home.
Shippy, the little man with the sharp rat-eyes,
Creeps into an old house in beleaguered Richmond
And meets a woman dressed in severe black silk
With a gentle voice, soft delicate useless hands,
A calm, smooth, faded, handsome mask of a face
And an incredible secret under her brooches.
You would picture her with ivory crochet-needles
Demurely tatting, demurely singing mild hymns
To an old melodeon before a blurred mirror.
She is to live in Richmond throughout the war,
A Union spy, never caught, never once suspected,
And when she dies, she dies with a shut prim mouth
Locked on her mystery. Shippy is afraid.
She gives him instructions, he tries to remember them.
But his hands are sweating, his eyes creep around the floor.
He is afraid of the rustle of the black silk.
He wishes he were back in Pollet’s
