Cold in the blackjack limb
The winds of the sky for his sponsor-men
And a bird to christen him.
Now listen to me, you Tennessee corn,
And listen to my word,
This is the first child ever born
That was christened by a bird.
He’s going to act like a hound let loose
When he comes from the blackjack tree,
And he’s going to walk in proud shoes
All over Tennessee.
I’ll feed him milk out of my own breast
And call him Whistling Jack.
And his dad’ll bring him a partridge nest,
As soon as his dad comes back.
John Brown’s raid has gone forward, the definite thing is done,
Not as we see it done when we read the books,
A clear light burning suddenly in the sky,
But dimly, obscurely, a flame half-strangled by smoke,
A thing come to pass from a victory not a victory,
A dubious doctrine dubiously received.
The papers praise, but the recruiting is slow,
The bonds sell badly, the grind of the war goes on—
There is no sudden casting off of a chain,
Only a slow thought working its way through the ground,
A slow root growing, touching a hundred soils,
A thousand minds—no blossom or flower yet.
It takes a long time to bring a thought into act
And when it blossoms at last, the gardeners wonder—
There have been so many to labor this patch of ground,
Garrison, Beecher, a dozen New England names,
Courageous, insulting Sumner, narrow and strong,
With his tongue of silver and venom and his wrecked body,
Wendell Phillips, Antinous of Harvard—
But now that the thought has arisen, they are not sure
It was their thought after all—it is good enough—
The best one could expect from a man like Lincoln,
But this and that are wrong, are unshrewdly planned,
We could have ordered it better, we knew the ground,
It should have been done before, in a different way,
And our praise is grudging. Pity the gardeners,
Pity Boston, pity the pure in heart,
Pity the men whom Time goes past in the night,
Without their knowledge. They worked through the heat of the day.
Let us even pity
Wendell Phillips, Antinous of Harvard,
For he was a model man and such men deserve
A definite pity at times. He too did his best.
Secure in his own impenetrable self-knowledge,
He seldom agreed with Lincoln or thought him wise;
He sometimes thought that a stunning defeat would give
A needed lesson to the soul of the nation,
And, before, would have broken the Union as blithely as Yancey
For his own side of abolition, speaking about it
In many public meetings where he was heckled
But usually silenced the hecklers sooner or later
With his mellifluous, masculine, well-trained accents.
War could hardly come too soon for a man like that
And when it came, he was busy. He did his part,
Being strong and active, blessed with a ready mind,
And the cause being one to which he professed devotion,
He spoke. He spoke well, with conviction, and frequently.
So much for the banner-bearers of abolition,
The men who carried the lonely flag for years
And could bear defeat with the strength of the pure in heart
But could not understand the face of success.
The other dissenters are simpler to understand.
They are ready to fight for the Union but not for niggers,
They don’t give a damn for niggers and say so now
With a grievous cry. And yet the slow root-thought works
Gradually through men’s minds. The Lancashire spinners,
Thrown out of work because no cotton can come
To feed their mills through the choking Union blockade,
Yet hold starvation meetings and praise the Union.
The tide has begun to turn in some English minds,
The watchers overseas feel their hands grow numb,
Slidell and Mason and Huse still burrow and argue,
But a cold breath blows through the rooms with the chandeliers,
A door is beginning to close. Few men perceive
The turn of the tide, the closing of the door.
Lincoln does not perceive it. He sees alone
The grind of the war, the lagging of the recruits,
Election after election going against him,
And Lee back safe in Virginia after Antietam
While McClellan sticks for five weeks and will not move.
He loses patience at last and removes McClellan.
Burnside succeeds him— and the grimly bewildered
Army of the Potomac has a new rider,
Affable, portly, whiskered and self-distrusting,
Who did not wish the command and tried to decline it,
Took it at last and almost wept when he did.
A worried man who passes like a sad ghost
Across November, looking for confidence,
And beats his army at last against stone walls
At Fredericksburg in the expected defeat
With frightful slaughter. The news of the thing comes back.
There are tears in his eyes. He never wanted command.
“Those men over there,” he groans, “Those men over there”
—They are piled like cordwood in front of the stone wall—
He wants to lead a last desperate charge himself,
But he is restrained. The sullen army draws back,
Licking its wounds. The night falls. The newspapers rave.
There are sixty-three hundred dead in that doomed attack
That never should have been made. His shoulders are bowed.
He tries a vain march in the mud and resigns at last
The weapon he could not wield. Joe Hooker succeeds him.
The winter clamps down, cold winter of doubt and grief.
The sun shines, the wind goes by,
The prisoners and captives lie
In a cell without an eye.
Winter will not touch them more
Than the cold upon a sore
That was frozen long before.
Summer will not make them sweet
Nor the rainy Springs refresh
That extremity of heat
In the self-corrupting flesh.
The band blares, the bugles snort,
They lose the fort or take the fort,
Someone writes a wise report.
Someone’s name is Victory.
The prisoners and captives lie
Too long dead before they die.
For all prisoners and captives now,
For the dark legion,
The Andersonvillers, the Castle Thunder men,
The men who froze at Camp Morton and came from the dungeons
With blood burst out on their faces.
The men who died at Salisbury and Belle Isle,
Elmira, St. Louis, Camp Douglas—the Libby tunnellers—
The men in the fetid air.
There are charges back and forth upon either side,
Some true, some false. You can read the official reports,
The dozen thick black-bound volumes of oaths and statements,
A desert of type, a dozen black mummy-cases
Embalming the long-forgotten,
