University of Virginia Library

Bugles!
And the Great Nation thrills and leaps to arms!
Prompt, unconstrained, immediate,
Without misgiving and without debate,
Too calm, too strong for fury or alarms,
The people blossoms armies and puts forth
The splendid summer of its noiseless might;
For the old sap of fight
Mounts up in South and North,
The thrill
That tingled in our veins at Bunker Hill
And brought to bloom July of 'Seventy-Six!
Pine and palmetto mix
With the sequoia of the giant West
Their ready banners, and the hosts of war,
Near and far,
Sudden as dawn,
Innumerable as forests, hear the call
Of the bugles,
The battle-birds!
For not alone the brave, the fortunate,
Who first of all
Have put their knapsacks on—
They are the valiant vanguard of the rest!—
Not they alone, but all our millions wait,
Hand on sword,
For the word
That bids them bid the nations know us sons of Fate.

Bugles!
And in my heart a cry,
—Like a dim echo far and mournfully
Blown back to answer them from yesterday!
A soldier's burial!
November hillsides and the falling leaves
Where the Potomac broadens to the tide—
The crisp autumnal silence and the gray
(As of a solemn ritual
Whose congregation glories as it grieves,
Widowed but still a bride)—
The long hills sloping to the wave,
And the lone bugler standing by the grave!

Taps!
The lonely call over the lonely woodlands—
Rising like the soaring of wings,
Like the flight of an eagle—
Taps!
They sound forever in my heart.
From farther still,
The echoes—still the echoes!
The bugles of the dead
Blowing from spectral ranks an answering cry!
The ghostly roll of immaterial drums,
Beating reveille in the camps of dream,
As from far meadows comes,
Over the pathless hill,
The irremeable stream.
I hear the tread
Of the great armies of the Past go by;
I hear,
Across the wide sea wash of years between,
Concord and Valley Forge shout back from the unseen,
And Vicksburg give a cheer.

Our cheer goes back to them, the valiant dead!
Laurels and roses on their graves to-day,
Lilies and laurels over them we lay,
And violets o'er each unforgotten head.
Their honor still with the returning May
Puts on its springtime in our memories,
Nor till the last American with them lies
Shall the young year forget to strew their bed.

Peace to their ashes, sleep and honored rest!
But we—awake!
Ours to remember them with deeds like theirs!
From sea to sea the insistent bugle blares,
The drums will not be still for any sake;
And as an eagle rears his crest,
Defiant, from some tall pine of the north,
And spreads his wings to fly,
The banners of America go forth
Against the clarion sky.
Veteran and volunteer,
They who were comrades of that shadow host,
And the young brood whose veins renew the fires
That burned in their great sires,
Alike we hear
The summons sounding clear
From coast to coast,—
The cry of the bugles,
The battle-birds!

As some great hero men have dreamed might be,
Sigurd or Herakles or Launcelot,
Too strong to reckon up the gain or pain,
With equal and indifferent disdain
Keeping or keeping not
What he may win,
Gives to the world his victory
And to the weak the labors he might spare,
My knightly country, the world's paladin,
Throw out its pennon to the air
To make a people free!
Rejoice, O Cuba! thy worst foe
Is overthrown.
The money dragon,
The Old Serpent,
Thy jailer's strong defence, laid low,
Cast down,
Pierced to the bone,
Makes off to nurse his wound,
Dragging his scaly length along the ground.
Ha, ha! he is sick,
He hath no stomach for the battle.
With dull reptilian malice in his eyes,
Spoiled of his prey, he lies,
Blinking his glutton hatred from his lair.
Plotting new outrage in his den,
He waits to be strong again.
—Let him beware!
For we, who have smitten him once,
Shall smite him again!
A passing wound for the nonce,
But a death blow then!
Now with a warning stroke,
That he coil not across our way
When the wronged cry under the yoke
And we may not stay;
But then in the hour of Doom
To his irrevocable tomb
Forever hurled,
That the world may again have room
For the sons of the world.

Rejoice again, O Cuba!
Rejoice, Gomez!
Rejoice, spirit of Maceo!
The voice of the Lord in the drums,
The cry of Jehovah in the bugles;
—Let my people go free!
Behold, I will burst their chain!
For my Deliverer comes,
He whom I have chosen to be
My Messenger on the Sea,
My Rod for the scourge of Spain!
I have endured her too long;
I have smitten and she has not ceased from wrong,—
I have forborne
And she has held me in scorn.
Now therefore for her misdeeds
Wherewith Time bleeds,
I who smote her by the hand of Drake
And wrenched from her the Sea,—
I who raised up Bolivar to shake
Her captive continent free,—
I will smite her for the third time in my wrath
And naught shall remain,
But a black char of memory in man's path,
Of the power of Spain.
We have heard the voice of the Lord;
Manila knows our answer, and Madrid
Shall hear it in our cannon at her gate,
Unless to save some remnant of her fate,
Ere that assault be bid,
She yield her conquered sword.

Let her not put her trust
In the nations that cry out
Against us, in them that flout
The battle of the just.
They have made themselves drunk with wind;
They have uttered a foolish cry
In the ears of the Lord on high;
But they shall not save her with words
—Nay, nor with swords—
From the doom of the sin she has sinned.

For the writ of the Powers does not run
Where the flag of the Union floats.
Fair and equal every one
We greet with loyal throats;
But we own no suzerain.
Thewed with freedom,
Mailed in destiny—
We shall maintain
Against the world our right,
Their peer in majesty, their peer in might.
Who now are they whose God is gain?
Let Rothschild-ridden Europe hold her peace!
Her jest is proved a lie.
They and not we refrain
From all things high
At the money-changers' cry;
They and not we have sold
Their flags for gold;
They and not we yield honor to increase.

Honor to England, that she does us right
At last, and, after many a valiant fight,
Forgets her ancient grudge!
But ye, O nations, be the Lord our judge
And yours the shame forever! How shall ye
In the unforgetting face of History
Look without blush hereafter? Ye who gave
To the Great Robber all your words of cheer,
And to the Champion of the Right a sneer—
What answer will ye have
When affronted Time demands
The shame and fame of nations at your hands?

Thou too, O France!
Thou, the beloved!—
Paul Jones and Lafayette in Paradise
Lift not their sad, ashamed, bewildered eyes,
But pass in silence with averted glance.
Twinned with us in the hearts of all the free,
O fair and dear, what have we done to thee?
What have we done to thee, beloved and fair,
That thou shouldst greet us with an alien stare,
And take to thy embrace
Her whose flag never flew but where it left the trace
Of murder and of rapine on the air?

Not only to lay low
The decrepit foe
—Proud, cruel, treacherous, but still brave,
With one foot in the grave—
But once for all
To warn the world that, though we do not brawl,
Our sword is ready to protect
The weak against the brutal strong,
Our guns are ready to exact
Justice of them that do us wrong.

Ay, we “remember the Maine,”
The mighty ship
And the men thereon!
There is no court for nations that can mete
The just reward for murder upon Spain;
No Arbiter can put the black cap on;
No sovereign nation, shorn of sovereignship,
Be brought, a felon, to the judgment seat
—Except by war!
Cease then this silly prate,
That to do justice on the evil-doer
Is vengeful and unworthy of the State.
Remember the Maine—
That all the world as well as Spain
May know that God has given us the sword
To punish crime and vindicate his word.
Ye pompous prattlers, cease
Your idle platitudes of peace
When there is no peace!
Back to your world of books, and leave the world of men
To them that have the habit of the real,
Nor longer with a mask of fair ideal
Hide your indifference to the facts of pain!

Not against war,
But against wrong,
League we in mighty bonds from sea to sea!
Peace, when the world is free!
Peace, when there is no thong,
Fetter nor bar!
No scourges for men's backs,
No thumbscrews and no racks—
For body or soul!
No unjust law!
No tyrannous control
Of brawn or maw!
But, though the day be far,
Till then, war!

Blow, bugles!
Over the rumbling drum and marching feet
Sound your high, sweet defiance to the air!
Great is war—great and fair!
The terrors of his face are grand and sweet,
And to the wise the calm of God is there.
God clothes himself in darkness as in light,
—The God of love, but still the God of might.
Nor love they least
Who strike with right good will
To vanquish ill
And fight God's battle upward from the beast.

By strife as well as loving—strife,
The Law of Life,—
In brute and man the climbing has been done
And shall be done hereafter. Since man was,
No upward-climbing cause
Without the sword has ever yet been won.

Bugles!
The imperious bugles!
Still their call
Soars like an exaltation to the sky.
They call on men to fall,
To die,—
Remembered or forgotten, but a part
Of the great beating of the Nation's heart!
A call to sacrifice!
A call to victory!
Hark, in the Empyrean
The battle-birds!
The bugles!