The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman :: :: University of Virginia Library

XIV

1

Sprung was the bow at last;
And the barbed and pointed dart,
Keen with stings of the past,
Barbed with a vain remorse,
Clove for itself a course

Straight to the father's heart;
And a lonely wanderer stood,
Mazed in a mist of thought,
On the edge of a field of blood.
—For a battle had been fought,
And the cavalry skirmish was but a wild prelude
To the broader carnage that heaped a field in vain:
A terrible battle had been fought,
Till its changeful current brought
Tumultuous, angry surges roaring back
To the lines where our army had lain.
The lawyer, driven hard by an inward pain,
Was crossing, in search of a dying son, the track
Where the deluge rose and fell, and its stranded wrack
Had sown the loathing earth with human slain.

2

Friends and foes,—who could discover which,
As they marked the zigzag, outer ditch,
Or lay so cold and still in the bush,
Fallen and trampled down in the last wild rush?
Then the shattered forest-trees; the clearing there
Where a battery stood; dead horses, pawing the air
With horrible upright hoofs; a mangled mass
Of wounded and stifled men in the low morass;
And the long trench dug in haste for a burial-pit,
Whose yawning length and breadth all comers fit.

3

And over the dreadful precinct, like the lights
That flit through graveyard walks in dismal nights,
Men with lanterns were groping among the dead,
Holding the flame to every hueless face,
And bearing those whose life had not wholly fled
On stretchers, that looked like biers, from the ghastly place.

4

The air above seemed heavy with errant souls,
Dense with ghosts from those gory forms arisen,—
Each rudely driven from its prison,
'Mid the harsh jar of rattling musket-rolls,
And quivering throes, and unexpected force;
In helpless waves adrift confusedly,
Freighting the sombre haze without resource.
Through all there trickled, from the pitying sky,
An infinite mist of tears upon the ground,
Muffling the groans of anguish with its sound.

5

On the borders of such a land, on the bounds of Death,
The stranger, shuddering, moved as one who saith:
“God! what a doleful clime, a drear domain!”
And onward, struggling with his pain,
Traversed the endless camp-fires, spark by spark,
Past sentinels that challenged from the dark,
Guided through camp and camp to one long tent
Whose ridge a flying bolt from the field had rent
Letting the midnight mist, the battle din,
Fall on the hundred forms that writhed within.

6

Beyond the gaunt Zouave at the nearest cot,
And the bugler shot in the arm, who lay beside
(Looking down at the wounded spot
Even then, for all the pain, with boyish pride),
And a score of men, with blankets opened wide,
Showing the gory bandages which bound
The paths of many a deadly wound,
—Over all these the stranger's glances sped
To one low stretcher, at whose head
A woman, bowed and brooding, sate,
As sit the angels of our fate,

Who, motionless, our births and deaths await.
He whom she tended moaned and tost,
Restless, as some laborious vessel, lost
Close to the port for which we saw it sail,
Groans in the long perpetual gale;
But she, that watched the storm, forbore to weep.
Sometimes the stranger saw her move
To others, who also with their anguish strove;
But ever again her constant footsteps turned
To one who made sad mutterings in his sleep;
Ever she listened to his breathings deep,
Or trimmed the midnight lamp that feebly burned.