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There are Very Few Truly Stunning Modern Poems of the Civil War - This is One of Them

Lee in the Mountains

by Donald Davidson

With an Introduction by Daniel Mallock

“Every generation writes its own history.” Carl Becker (1873-1945), noted historian, academic, author, and past president of the American Historical Association is credited with this very famous statement. However, this doesn’t quite ring true for poetry. Why this is the case, is something of a mystery. Becker said that “we build our conceptions of history partly out of our present needs and purposes (”What are historical facts?”).

There are several possible answers, and both lead to unpleasant conclusions (for those who love poetry, certainly):
* Current interest in poetry is minimal.
* There are no poets of note interested in the subject.

I’m sure there must be other reasons for this dearth in Civil War poetry, perhaps poets figure that what has already been written is better than what they can do now. But this is absurd, as each generation gets a shot at understanding, and writing about our past. Isn’t that what art is supposed to be about, helping us understand the past because each generation sees the world in a different way than its predecessors?

Great poetry should be both inclusive and expansive, containing a world on a page that readily could require volumes if written in standard prose. Great poetry ought to be a short cut to take the reader somewhere they can never go, understand people in a way that otherwise they could not. As art, it ought to say something, “speak” clearly and passionately to the reader and capture the subject and place and moment in a way that the reader may have to repair to an art museum or the concert hall for similar experiences.

Civil War poetry rarely captures the grandness, the astounding horror and complexity of the events and people involved. In recent memory, three poems have stood above all the others in the public mind, two of them well deserve their reputations. The other does not. I will be discussing these poems, one good the other not, in later posts.

In my opinion, the poem presented here is one of the two finest modern attempts to capture the Civil War in poetry. It is grand in its sweep capturing the times, and the country, the feelings of place and people involved in that momentous struggle. Its setting is post-war and the survivors are marching home in triumph or limping home in weary defeat and full of trepidation for an unknown future. The imagery is lush, the timing is perfect. It is expansive, and inclusive -the spirit of the previous generations alive and involved leaving a legacy for all to learn by. Robert E. Lee is in the mountains, finally. Interrupted by Appomattox, and the end of the Confederacy, Lee is finally in the mountains. Johnston is gone, the armies are gone. Guns are shelved and swords rusting, and the chill air is blowing in the trees shifting candle flames and stirring memories.

It is sad, and grand, and powerful. It is one of the finest poems of the Civil War ever written. If you’ve not seen this before, you are in for a treat. Pride of mission, of place, of heritage- sadness for the sacrifices, and horrors of the past, and a deep appreciation for the bravery and estimable character of those who have come before. It is a poem of pain and hope and loss. Generations overlap here, and heroes of the revolution are brought back by a yearning son in civilian clothes with no flags, no divisions and corps, only the wind in the mountains. One can almost hear the wind and feel the chill of the hills.

The war is over, and Robert E. Lee is no longer the General, but the son again of Light Horse Harry, disappeared so many years ago. The old pain and bitter sadness and utter desolation of the war and of Lee’s lost father come together in this brilliant poem that covers so much historical, emotional, and American ground in such a short time.

Donald Davidson (d. 4/1968), a Vanderbilt student and later professor would write this stunning piece sometime around 1938. A member of the Vanderbilt “Fugitives”, named after a literary journal by the same name, he would be among an august crowd of superb poets and writers including Randall Jarrell arguably the finest American poet of ww2, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate. Tate is the author of “Ode to the Confederate Dead” which I will cover in a future post.

Davidson’s is a poem, like Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”, that I respect, and that makes me shiver every time I read it. Like Lowell’s poem which I will cover in a future post, this is a classic forever of American letters filling the heart of the reader with respect, sadness, and a physical sense of reality - what is happening in the poem is utterly real and true. It is better than superb. What a profound legacy to the country that the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt should leave but to found an institution such as that which fostered the “Fugitives”.

Let’s go back to Becker, just for a moment. “The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves — a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future.” This is also a function of poetry, especially war poetry. It helps us understand the past, and to prepare for but not to foretell the future.

Poetry and literature help us build our humanity and understanding of our experiences, and one another, it is part of the fiber of our personal and national characters. Like history itself, historical poetry brings us back to memory and fortifies us for the future. The cool light of historiography is off, and now the warm and hot glows of emotion are on. Poetry demands a different kind of attention and fosters a deeper more emotional learning. In historiography we want “the facts” as a foundation; in poetry the people are the foundation and the events are the whirlwinds that take them up, and throw them back down again. Poetry is about the feelings that events produce in those caught up in the storm of events, it helps us deeply understand both them and the events. This may be one of the reasons why there are so few brilliant modern Civil War poems, perhaps we’ve lost some deep understanding along the way.

Few poems of the Civil War are as real and as human as this one.

The combat is over, Lee is in the mountains, in a reverie on his father, and his dreams for a bright future. He is haunted, dark. He was making for the mountains when Appomattox changed his plans forever. He was making for the mountains, and the future - and in this poem, he finally gets there.

Enjoy.
-Daniel Mallock

Lee in the Mountains

by Donald Davidson

Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president’s office. . . .

Hearing the voices

Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don’t get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)

The young have time to wait

But soldiers’ faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.

My father’s house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father’s look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then–I was a child–his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.

Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son’s devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father’s hand–
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.

If all were told, as it cannot be told–
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States–

If a word were said, as it cannot be said–
I see clear waters run in Virginia’s Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter’s hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier’s trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men,

Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said–
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands–

The pen

Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.

Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett’s men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.

The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersburg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomattox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson’s quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.

It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children’s children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.