WAR-TIME SILHOUETTES.
I
THE BATTLE
The night had passed. The day had come,
Bright-born, into a cloudless sky:
We heard the rolling of the drum,
And saw the war-flags fly.
And noon had crowded upon morn
Ere Conflict shook her red locks far,
And blew her brazen battle-horn
Upon the hills of War.
Noon darkened into dusk—one blot
Of nightmare lit with hell-born suns;—
We heard the scream of shell and shot
And booming of the guns.
On batteries of belching grape
We saw the thundering cavalry
Hurl headlong,—iron shape on shape,—
With shout and bugle-cry.
When dusk had moaned and died, and night
Came on, wind-swept and wild with rain,
We slept, 'mid many a bivouac light,
And vast fields heaped with slain.
II
IN HOSPITAL
Wounded to death he lay and dreamed
The drums of battle beat afar,
And round the roaring trenches screamed
The hell of war.
Then woke; and, weeping, spoke one word
To the kind nurse who bent above;
Then in the whitewashed ward was heard
A song of love.
The song she sang him when she gave
The portrait that he kissed; then sighed,
“Lay it beside me in the grave!”
And smiled and died.
III
THE SOLDIER'S RETURN
A brown wing beat the apple leaves and shook
Some blossoms on her hair. Then, note on note,
The bird's wild music bubbled. In her book,
Her old romance, she seemed to read. No look
Betrayed the tumult in her trembling throat.
The thrush sang on. A dreamy wind came down
From one white cloud of afternoon and fanned
The dropping petals on her book and gown,
And touched her hair, whose braids of quiet brown
Gently she smoothed with one white jeweled hand.
Then, with her soul, it seemed, from feet to brow
She felt him coming: 't was his heart, his breath
That stirred the blossom on the apple bough;
His step the wood-thrush warbled to. And now
Her cheek went crimson, now as white as death.
Then on the dappled page his shadow—yes,
Not unexpected, yet her haste assumed
Fright's startle; and low laughter did confess
His presence there, soft with his soul's caress
And happy manhood, where the rambo bloomed.
Quickly she rose and all her gladness sent
Wild welcome to him. Her his unhurt arm
Drew unresisted; and the soldier leant
Fond lips to hers. She wept. And so they went
Deep in the orchard towards the old brick farm.
IV
THE APPARITION
A day of drought, foreboding rain and wind,
As if stern heaven, feeling earth had sinned,
Frowned all its hatred. When the evening came,
Along the west, from bank on bank unthinned
Of clouds, the storm unfurled its oriflamme.
Then lightning signaled, and the thunder woke
Its monster drums, and all God's torrents broke.—
She saw the wild night when the dark pane flashed;
Heard, where she stood, the disemboweled oak
Roar into fragments when the welkin crashed.
Long had she waited for a word. And, lo!
Anticipation still would not say “No:”
He has not written; he will come to her;
At dawn!—to-night!—Her heart hath told her so;
And so expectancy and love aver.
She seems to hear his fingers on the pane—
The glass is blurred, she can not see for rain:
Is that his horse?—the wind is never still:
And that his cloak?—ah, surely that is plain!—
A torn vine tossing at the window-sill.
She hurries forth to meet him; pale and wet,
She sees his face; the war-soiled epaulet;
A sabre-scar that bleeds from brow to cheek;
And now he smiles, and now their lips have met,
And now ... Dear heart, he fell at Cedar Creek!
V
WOUNDED
It was in August that they brought her news
Of his bad wounds; the leg that he must lose.
And August passed, and when October raised
Red rebel standards on the hills that blazed,
They brought a haggard wreck; she scarce knew whose,
Until they told her, standing stunned and dazed.
A shattered shadow of the stalwart lad,
The five-months husband, whom his country had
Enlisted, strong for war; returning this,
Whose broken countenance she feared to kiss,
While health's remembrance stood beside him sad,
And grieved for that which was no longer his.
They brought him on a litter; and the day
Was bright and beautiful. It seemed that May
In woodland rambles had forgot her path
Of season, and, disrobing for a bath,
By the autumnal waters of some bay,
With her white nakedness had conquered Wrath.
Far otherwise she wished it: wind and rain;
The sky, one gray commiserative pain;
Sleet, and the stormy drift of frantic leaves;
To match the misery that each perceives
Aches in her hand-clutched bosom, and is plain
In eyes and mouth and all her form that grieves.
Theirs, a mute meeting of the lips; she stooped
And kissed him once: one long, dark side-lock drooped
And brushed against the bandage of his breast;
With feeble hands he held it and caressed;
Then all his happiness in one look grouped,
Saying, “Now I am home, I crave but rest.”
Once it was love! but then the battle killed
All that sweet nonsense of his youth, and filled
His heart with sterner passion.—Ah, well! peace
Must balm its pain with patience; whose surcease
Means reconcilement; e'en as God hath willed,
With war or peace who shapes His ends at ease.—
What else for these but, where their mortal lot
Of weak existence drags rent ends, to knot
The frail unravel up!—while love (afraid
Time will increase the burthen on it laid),
Seeks consolation, that consoleth not,
In toil and prayer, waiting what none evade.
VI
THE MESSAGE
Long shadows toward the east: and in the west
A blaze of garnet sunset, wherein rolled
One cloud like some great gnarly log of gold;
Each gabled casement of the farm seemed dressed
In ghosts of roses blossoming manifest.
And she had brought his letter there to read,
There on the porch, that faced the locust glade;
To watch the summer sunset burn and fade,
And breathe the twilight scent of wood and weed,
Forget all care and her soul's hunger feed.
And on his face her fancy mused a while:
“Dark hair, dark eyes.—And now he has a beard
Dark as his hair.”—She smiled; yet almost feared
It changed him so she could not reconcile
Her heart to that which hid his lips and smile.
Then tried to feature, but could only see
The beardless man who bent to her and kissed
Her and their child and left them to enlist:
She heard his horse grind in the gravel: he
Waved them adieu and rode to fight with Lee.
Now all around her drowsed the hushful hum
Of evening insects. And his letter spoke
Of love and longings to her: nor awoke
One echo of the bugle and the drum,
But all their future in one kiss did sum.
The stars were thick now; and the western blush
Drained into darkness. With a dreamy sigh
She rocked her chair.—It must have been the cry
Of infancy that made her rise and rush
To where their child slept, and to hug and hush.
Then she returned. But now her ease was gone.
She knew not what, she felt an unknown fear
Press, tightening, at her heart-strings; then a tear
Scalded her eyelids, and her cheeks grew wan
As helpless sorrow's, and her white lips drawn.
With stony eyes she grieved against the skies,
A slow, dull, aching agony that knew
Few tears, and saw no answer shining to
Her silent questions in the stars' still eyes,
“Where Peace delays and where her soldier lies.”
They could have told her. Peace was far away,
Beyond the field that belched black batteries
All the red day. 'Mid picket silences,
On woodland mosses, in a suit of gray,
Shot through the heart, he by his rifle lay.
VII
THE WOMAN ON THE HILL
The storm-red sun, through wrecks of wind and rain,
And dead leaves driven from the frantic boughs,
Where, on the hill-top, stood a gaunt, gray house,
Flashed wildest ruby on each rainy pane.
Then woods grew darker than unburdened grief;
And, crimson through the woodland's ruin, streamed
The sunset's glare—a furious eye, which seemed
Watching the moon rise like a yellow leaf.
The rising moon, against which, like despair,
High on the hill, a woman, darkly drawn,
The wild leaves round her, stood; with features wan,
And tattered dress and wind-distracted hair.
As still as death, and looking, not through tears,
For the young face of one she knows is lost,
While in her heart the melancholy frost
Gathers of all the unforgotten years.
What if she heard to-night a hurrying hoof,
Wild as the whirling of the withered leaf,
Bring her a more immedicable grief,
A shattered shape to live beneath her roof!
The shadow of him who claimed her once as wife;
Her lover!—no!—the wreck of all their past
Brought back from battle!—Better to the last
A broken heart than heartbreak all her life!
