A Bit of Gold Tumbles from Between the Covers

Introduced by Daniel Mallock

Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body is one of the finest books of prose poetry in American literature. It well-deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929. It has always had a special place in the hearts of most Civil War students, and those who appreciate the Blue and Gray. Benet died young, but was prolific and busy publishing often.

Long considered one of the finest biographies in Civil War literature, Douglas Southall Freeman’s R.E. Lee is still considered the finest biography of Lee, one of our greatest Americans. I was unaware that Benet and Freeman and their work ever overlapped but it is right and good that they did.

I had the great fortune recently to purchase a 1st edition set of R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman. I’ve always wanted to read this biography, but never blocked out the time much to my ongoing frustration. Now, that frustration can end. The set has some water damage on the covers, so it has little value to collectors but its value to me is enormous. Freeman won the Pulitzer prize for biography for this monumental work in 1935. Many years ago, I read Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants. R.E. Lee was always beckoning me.

As I examined my newly acquired set I was amazed to see that the seller had included a special gift for me. This gift I will soon pass along to you.

Out from in between the front covers of the first volume fell the original newspaper clipping, neatly folded of Stephen Vincent Benet’s review of the first two volumes of Freeman’s R.E. Lee. This review appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, Book Section, Sunday, October 14, 1934, the year that the first two volumes were published. My delight at reading this previously unknown, to me, review by Benet was obvious from my smiles and “wows” as I read the fragile paper. What a great thing for the fellow who sold me this set to do! My surprise at finding an important review I never knew existed was matched in large part by the appreciation I felt for the kind person who left it there in Volume 1 for me to find. I’ve since done a search on the internet for this review and have not been able to find it anywhere. I suspect that it is not posted on the internet at all. But it is now.

Benet is not shy about heaping praise on Freeman for this biography of Lee. Rarely, a review will surpass the utilitarian and step into the realm of art – as Benet’s does. Clearly, Benet was very happy to read this excellent biography it’s quite obvious. Benet says, that in this biography, “Lee is all there”, and that certainly is high praise for any biographer. Freeman’s Lee set the standard for Lee scholarship and has to my knowledge not yet been surpassed.

Benet writes that Washington and Lee are the two greatest Americans. He respects Lincoln and Grant, and many others but Lee and Washington are clearly, for Benet, in a pantheon all their own. After reading Freeman’s Lee, the first two volumes, at that point, Benet makes a plea that Freeman must now write a biography of Washington to match the Lee study. Bowing to Benet, in a sense, Freeman did just that.

Freeman would win his second Pulitzer for biography (posthumously, in 1958) for his 7-volume biography of George Washington.

I transcribed this myself. If you find any errors, or bad syntax please blame me and not Mr. Benet. I do not believe that this review is currently available online, and I post it as a service to everyone who loves literature, and Lee, and the great heroes of our Civil War on both sides. This is a beautiful review of a fantastic biography. I know you will enjoy this as much as I have.

-Daniel Mallock

New York Herald Tribune, Book Section, Sunday, October 14, 1934

Robert E. Lee: a Great American Biography
The Whole Man–Boyhood, West Point, Mexico, and the Civil War

R.E. Lee

By Douglas Southall Freeman…Illustrated.. Vol. I., 647 pp; vol. II, 621 pp… New York Charles Scribner’s Sons… 2 vols., $7.50Reviewed by Stephen Vincent Benet

It may seem odd, at first, that we should have had to wait so long for a life of Lee like this one, but, when one thinks it over, it is not so odd after all. Certain great men attract biography from the first, others, equally famous, for years attract only biographers. Learned biographers, enthusiastic or caustic biographers, but biographers who do not get to the roots of the man. Nor is it merely a question of luck or celebrity – though luck enters into the matter. Certain names, certain stories are always explosive material. It is easy enough to write a bad life of Napoleon but it is extremely hard to write a thoroughly and conscientiously dull one – though Sir Walter Scott, of all people, worked notably hard at it. Conspicuous rascality in the subject is not enough; there have been tiresome rascals. Virtue is not enough– there can be no question as to which was the more admirable human being in almost every ordinary relation of life, Byron or Southey. Yet there will be biographies of Byron till the world runs out of ink, while biographies of Southey sleep soundly in great public libraries. Literary genious in the biographer is not, by itself, enough – as witness Charles Dickens and the “Life of Our Lord.”

For true biography is a very difficult art. And it is curious that, in our short history as a nation, two of our greatest figures – Washington and Lee – should have been such difficult subjects for true biography. We have almost every possible view of Washington, from Parson Weems to W. E. Woodward. We have views of his that show him as an impossible demigod and views of him that seem to concentrate almost entirely on his false teeth. And yet, in spite of much interesting work, we still have no life of Washington as full, as just, as sound, as comprehending, and yet as readable as many of us would like.

Mere reverence is not enough, for reverence, by itself, quickly turns men into marble statues a little over life—size. Nor is the Stracheyesque method–which produces brilliant results with the proper material–adapted to them. I remember one life of General Grant from which the chief psychological fact I garnered was that the general was deeply in love with his horse. That is interesting, if true, but it hardly explains the capture of Fort Donelson. And it is easy enough to paint George Washington as an ordinary Virginia planter of limited capacities–until you begin to explain why all the other Virginia planters did not turn into Washingtons.

Dr. Freeman, fortunately for us all, is a true biographer. He has a great subject to deal with–which is to his advantage–but the subject, as I have said, is not an easy one. The man’s life, and himself, are, in one sense, like a marble shaft; you may look in vain for the disfiguring–and interesting–cracks and crevices that spot the characters of many great men. A hero, born in obscurity, who fights his way up to greatness–there is an easy story for you! But Lee was born at Stratford, of the blood of “King” Carter and “Light Horse Harry” Lee. We like to read of the awkward, ugly duckling, the butt of his mates at school and college, who became their master in the end. But Lee was one of the handsomest men of his day, and at West Point he graduated second in his class. In childhood he had the weight of a great tradition behind him; in youth and manhood he fulfilled the full promise of that tradition. When Lincoln was a disappointed ex-Congressman, his political future, apparently, at a dead end, Lee was winning notable distinction in his chosen field. When Grant was still the failure of Galena, Lee was being sounded out as to the commander-ship-in-chief of the whole Union Army. No breath of romantic scandal ever touched his private life; he became the idol of a people and the symbol of a cause without ever losing his simplicity; even his religion, simple, natural and profound, has nothing of the Cromwellian tang of Jackson’s. It did not torment his soul, it gave his soul peace. A good man, a great man, one of our finest human beings. You are right. But a difficult man to depict and yet keep human, for the rest of us. Let us see what Dr. Freeman has done with his material.

In the first place, he shows us from the very first lines of his forward the thoroughness, the patience, the honesty and the true gift for research which are the rare marks of the real biographer.

He has winnowed, and winnowed away an enormous mass of legend. He has collected and set down for the first time in print a vast number of new, precise and salient facts. He has woven together a thousand strands of testimony from the words of forgotten reports to the words on the lips of old men remembering their great youth. In Dr. Freeman’s two volumes we get for the first time the complete, slow growth of a man. The unregarded years–the years of youth and early manhood, the years before the Mexican War and after it, are filled in with completeness and patience for the first time. We see not only Lee the star cadet or Lee the Mars’ Robert of the tales, but Lee at thirty-one on an Ohio River steamer enjoying little roast pigs and sausages but looking with a dubious eye on the crowding and squeezing at the table; Lee building a house of twigs for seven military hens at a desolate army outpost near the fork of the Brazos; Lee, the conscientious but somewhat baffled inheritor of a historic but land-poor estate, wondering how to keep it up on an Army colonel’s pay–a dozen Lees, younger and older, whom the well known stories leave out. We see Lee the military organizer; we even see Lee in a temper.

But thoroughness and patience are not enough. A scholar may be very thorough and very patient and yet remain a scholar read only by scholars. There must be proportion, balance, composition; most of all, vitality in the work itself. Dr. Freeman’s style is not a showy one, and he does not go in for the purple passages. But every one of the 1,200 pages is intensely readable from the first page to the last. He is readable when he describes the Battle of Chancellorsville; he is readable when he describes the education of a West Point cadet in the 1820s or the technical details of the building of an obscure fort by an Army engineer. He has a positive genius for quotation–it is always the live quotation, not the dead one, that appears in his pages–and always at the point where it simplifies, explains, elucidates, gives life and color to the whole. He never points out the obvious; he never grows windy or pedantic. When he gives you an opinion on a disputed point he gives you his reasons as well. “There they are,” he seems to say, “to the best of my judgment. My conclusion is this–you may draw another if you disagree with me. But here are the facts, as far as they can be known.”

If I had sufficient space, I should very much like to quote his brief sketch of Anne Carter Lee, Lee’s mother, on pages 87 seq. It consists of a short appraisal and the only two known surviving letters of Mrs. Lee. The appraisal is short enough. It tells what is known of Anne Carter Lee; it does not tell what is not known. And it is a model to biographers. There is no one fact and twenty barrels of conjecture. There is no “As she did this, she must have done that.” There is a human being there, faintly outlined, because the written evidence is slight; but the outlines, though faint, are definite. There is a real and living woman, not a fictional character or a reverential image. I, for one, never knew her before.

As it is with Anne Carter Lee, so it is with the whole of the story. Slowly, on the firmest of foundations, there builds up the full picture of the man. And it is not the story of Fortunatus–of a silver-spoon youth who marched easily from conquest to conquest. It is something, indeed, to have been born at Stratford, of the Lees and Carters–but to have to leave Stratford at three, because the sheriff’s men are in the house, the horses sold, the furniture attached–that is something, too. One’s father is a revolutionary hero–and that is a great tradition–but one’s father has been twice imprisoned for debt and is to die on the way home from a self-imposed exile. One’s half-brother, “Black Horse Harry” Lee’s career is to be wrecked by tragedy and scandal. A background of great traditions? Very true–but there are other colors in the background than gold.

All through the life, the threads in the web are mixed ones. When Lee married Mary Custis he married a delightful woman but a temperamental one–and a woman who was to become an invalid, needing and invalid’s care. And, when he married her, as Dr. Freeman points out, he married Arlington as well–Arlington with its name, its heavy responsibilities and the great shadow of Washington brooding over it. Dr. Freeman’s analysis of the influence of the Washington tradition on the character of Lee is subtle, convincing and profound. Throughout the book, indeed, his study of the gradual development of Lee’s character is masterly. It has the fascination of a detective story and the inevitability of the growth of a tree.

Certain traits were there from the first and they were fine ones. But the gay, brilliant, teasing Lee of the twenties, the Lee who wrote amusing mock love letters to pleasant girl acquaintances in the Southern tradition of beaudom, had become, at fifty-four, a very different man. Throughout those first fifty-four years there is always upon him–and we see it and feel it–a continuous pressure of responsibility, never slackening, slowly increasing; responsibility for his name, for Arlington, for his work, for his wife, and children, for the men under his command. Except for the Mexican War, it was not a dramatic responsibility, in the usual sense. But a weaker man would have broken under it, and a man [of] a nature less naturally sweet become crotchety, like many another army officer who turned to drink or lethargy to while away the tedium of dull courts martial in Godforsaken frontier posts.

I have stressed Dr. Freeman’s dealings with Lee’s early years because they are the essential foundation on which all true knowledge of Lee must be built. When Lee assumed command of the forces of Virginia he was fifty-four and the main lines of his character were formed. He grew after that, be he grew along those lines, not contrary to them. Where many biographers are content to show effects, Dr. Freeman shows us the causes of those effects–and he does it so well and so thoroughly that by the time we come to the Civil War we have a real knowledge of Lee, not a set of phrases about him, and a real ability to know what Lee may do in a given circumstance. Dr. Freeman shows also–and this is invaluable–on the military side, exactly what experience of war and the conduct of war Lee had had, the sort of strategy and tactics that were likely to appeal to him, both his practical knowledge and the bent of his mind. I have never seen this done so clearly and so well.

There were weaknesses as well as strengths in both Lee’s temperament and Lee’s training–Dr. Freeman shows them both unfalteringly. The first untrained Virginia volunteers were a very different from Scott’s Mexican army–and Lee made mistakes in the West Virginia campaign. Dr. Freeman shows us what the mistakes were and what Lee learned from them. A courteous amiability, in dealing with subordinates, was likely to develop, with an obstinate subordinate, into failure of execution at a critical moment–as it did with Longstreet at Gettysburg–Dr. Freeman shows us the cloud at its beginning, no bigger than a man’s hand. Indeed, for all Dr. Freeman’s practical delineation of the campaigns up to and through Chancellorsville (with which these two volumes end) I can only have the most unstinted praise. With their excellent, clear and numerous maps, they should prove invaluable to all students of military history. And to the average reader they are perfectly fascinating.

For Dr. Freeman, in describing them, has taken a novel point of view. The reader is always with Lee, at Confederate headquarters, in possession of such knowledge as Lee has but no more. In other words, the battles develop before us as battles do to a general who is fighting one, with all their momentary chances. Excellent schemes go astray because of unknown factors–the “fog of war” is over the field, not swept away by after–knowledge. And the battles and campaigns are real. Behind the charges and the yells there is always the constant, wearing question of food and shoes and horses, of men who come down with measles and men who cannot march on the hard roads of Maryland because their feet are sore. All this is a constant reminder of warfare, but it does not always get into the histories. It is continually present in Dr. Freeman’s. And we know not only Lee, by the time we have reached Chancellorsville–we know the Army of Northern Virginia as well.

In any account of the events in the Civil War, the historian or biographer must strike upon a number of moot points. Dr. Freeman, as Lee’s biographer, inclines, very naturally, to cast his vote for Lee, on most of these points. But he never does so without giving full reasons for his statements. His explanation of Jackson’s lethargy during the Seven Days is clear, well reasoned and convincing–and his account of the genesis of the turning–movement at Chancellorsville seems to me a little miracle of reconstruction. On the other hand, for the average reader, I think he might have stressed, even more than he does, Jackson’s personal brilliance in the Valley Campaign. It is one thing to tell a general you would like a certain enemy beaten, if possible, and quite another to have the general do it–as Lincoln, to his sorrow, very often found. Nor is it my opinion that the reader who is unversed in the Civil War will form an utterly correct estimate of the military abilities of Joe Johnston, from Dr. Freeman’s account of him in these two volumes. Johnston was an unlucky general, in many ways, but the most competent testimony, including that of great adversaries, pronounced him a master of craft.

These are small criticisms on a monumental work, but, while I am about it, I will make one or two more. Dr. Freeman deals with John Brown and Harper’s Ferry entirely from the viewpoint of Lee and he is perfectly justified in doing so. But John Brown was not exactly an ordinary disturber of the peace nor was the raid on Harper’s Ferry precisely a riot. And the actual confrontation of Robert E. Lee and John Brown happens to be one of the great dramatic coincidences of history. I think Dr. Freeman could have made more of this than he has done without sacrificing truth to false picturesqeuness. If Lee dismissed Brown as a mere madman–as the testimony would indicate–that, too, shows something about Lee and about the South.

Jackson, Stuart, Longstreet, Magruder, Hood are vividly portrayed, but one might wish for a little fuller physical description of the two Hills, Ewell, Alexander and some of the other Southern leaders. They appear in their words and actions–and admirably–but the readers of an Iliad like to know the faces and armor of all the chiefs. The same might be said of the Northern commanders opposed to Lee. It does not fall directly within Dr. Freeman’s province to describe them, except as they showed themselves in action–but a brief, well-placed footnote on each, showing what sort of man he was, would assist the casual reader. Another, and somewhat vaguer criticism, is this. The heart of the Northern resistance was a man named Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Freeman is writing a life of Lee, not a life of Lincoln. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Lincoln’s presence should somewhere, somehow be felt by the reader–not as the amateur strategist recalling troops for the safety of Washington but as the soul of the o’her Cause. However, there is room for all this, and more, in the next two volumes.

Dr. Freeman is kinder to Davis than some Southern historians have been, and, I think, juster. In his dealing with Northern “atrocities” (the term is not his) he seems to me, now and then, a trifle biased. War is a dirty game, no matter how played. I remember an old man, with passion and indignation in his voice, showing me the marks of Confederate shell on the walls of my mother’s town. And he was as right–and as partisan–as Dr. Freeman. There is little of this in the book, very little, but as it struck me, I mention it. On the larger issues, he states his own feelings admirably in his Foreword–and they are without illusion.

The present two volumes begin with Stratford and end just after Chancellorsville. There are two more to come. One can ask no more of them than they should equal the two already in print. For those two already comprise by far the best biography of Lee of which I have any knowledge. And when I speak of a biography, I do not mean merely a work for research students and Civil War enthusiasts. The whole man is here, as he lived–Stratford–West Point–Arlington–Mexico–the heights of Cerro Gordo and the swamps of the Chickahominy. He is here, in war and in peace. He is writing a letter to somewhat stilted, anxious advice to his children on how to be good boys–and, at Chancellorsville, his is hearing “that shrill, sustained cry like a thousand men calling the dogs to a fox hunt” that was the rebel yell. And behind him is a tradition, an army, a time and a people–all as it was and not otherwise. Dr. Freeman has worked nearly twenty years on these volumes. And for those years, we are all of us in his debt. For he has revivified for us, lastingly and surely, one of the largest figures of our national past. It is a superb achievement. I do not know how Pulitzer prizes are awarded but I should be in favor of giving at least ten of them to Dr. Freeman. And then, if I were dictator, I would have him chained to a desk and make him spend his next twenty years writing a life of Washington whether he wants to or not.

Little Friend, Little Friend – Jarrell’s Powerful, Quiet, Short Homage to America’s War

Introduction by Daniel Mallock

A great poem ought to be huge – grand in scope, but not necessarily excessive in length. Great poetry should tell massive stories with multiple layers concisely and artfully. One doesn’t need obscure references, convoluted language, nor self-congratulatory internal winkings. Poetry is supposed to be honest. A great poem should pack a serious punch of power and style and insight.

It’s a complicated world and life is complex, confusing, and manifestly difficult to fathom. Poetry is at its does best when it illustrates and even explains something of life and humanity in a form that is reachable and readily understood, entertaining and impressive. Overly complex poetry tends to be more a demonstration of the art and poet rather than anything that might tend to educate, enlighten, or entertain the reader.

I’ve heaped praise and criticism on the Nashville Fugitives on these pages already. I believe the finest Civil War poem of the 20th century is by one of them – “Lee in the Mountains”, by Donald Davidson. Conversely, the worst Civil War poem of the last century was perpetrated by Allen Tate another Fugitive. His poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” is something of a crime; a criminal cruelty dumped upon an entire country by an otherwise credible poet. Tate’s poem has long been considered a classic, a suitable tribute to the Confederate dead – the truth is that both assertions are false.

Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” is a brilliant poem conceived by another writer associated with the Fugitives (Lowell studied under John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College). These three poems represent the finest and the worst 20th century poetic treatments of the Civil War. So, it is somewhat ironic that one of the finest poets of WW2 should also be a student of Ransom, and a colleague of Robert Lowell at Kenyon – another Fugitive associate and Nashvillian. Let’s now complete the Nashville connection…

Perhaps the greatest American poet of WW2 is Randall Jarrell. This poet who would write of bombing raids and dying ball-turret gunners, who would bring the reality of the war into his poetry so powerfully, so lyrically, and so successfully – was born in Nashville and would later teach at Vanderbilt, the very home of the Fugitives.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) could embed the nitty gritty of war into his work – the machinery, the oil, the gunmetal, the equipment of death and destruction. He would populate his poems with people who de-populated cities, the air crews of the Eighth Air Force, for example. Jarrell brought the casualties, the blood, the losses, the mechanics of war together in such a way as to bring the war home to the reader – Jarrell’s poems make World War Two real; every casualty is strongly felt.

As with most survivors of war, Jarrell was deeply affected if not scarred by his war experiences. Jarrell served in the Army Air Corps (precursor to the US Air Force) working in a control tower. He had enlisted to fly aircraft but failed to qualify. Jarrell went on to a very successful academic and writing career after the war becoming a noted critic and poet. He died in 1965 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in a traffic accident. It is not known if Jarrell’s death was a suicide or an accident, but his bouts with depression and the intense emotional depth of his poetry give one pause. Robert Lowell referred to his old Kenyon colleague as one of the “best lyric poets of the past”.

Jarrell’s war poems are jarring, and very real. He brings the experience home and slams it down on the page so that the reader must deal with it, somehow. As with so many of Jarrell’s WW2 poems reading “Little Friend, Little Friend” is an emotional experience, a jarring slap on the side of the head with the truth and ugly reality of war. The ugliness and horror of war can be shared via the beauty of poetry, with the obvious irony there for all to see.

One of Jarrell’s greatest poems is but a fragment and challenges the definition of poetry itself. It is very short, and very powerful. It seems to embrace the men and machines of the war, and put them back in the air where Jarrell always knew them to be – doing their terrible damage and raining death down upon the cities and one another.

David Perkins wrote, “They are vivid and moving incidents of combat, told with an exceptionally sensitive psychological insight and moral perplexity.” (A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 393.) Jarrell tells his stories in beautiful language, with little fanfare, and intense emotional power. His poems are novels on a page, huge stories of massive events and shattered people and cities all scrunched up on the page like a crashed bomber – and rebuilt in poetry by way of explanation.

“Little Friend, Little Friend” is a radio transmission/poem between a bomber pilot and a fighter pilot flying in hostile skies. They are there for each other to a certain extent, always just out of range. They do what they can for each other. And in these few lines is a very powerful, very simplified view of the comradery, ugliness, bravery, and extremes of fighting wars in the air. Jarrell is one of America’s most brilliant poets. It is a privilege to present this brilliant fragment/poem of Jarrell on my blog.

“Little Friend, Little Friend”
by Randall Jarrell, 1945

. . . . Then I heard the bomber call me in:

“Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two
engines on fire. Can you see me, Little
Friend?”

I said “I’m crossing right over you.
Let’s go home.”

The Bomber
Photo Courtesy of “100% Geek”

Little Friend
Photo Courtesy of “HistoryLink101″

“For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell – A Superb Civil War Poem that Continues to Resonate

Introduction by Daniel Mallock

It is altogether fitting and proper that this poem should be posted and read today, of all days. Martin Luther King day is the right day for this poem, this tribute to the Union dead of the Civil War and a particular remembrance of the black soldiers who wore the uniform of the Union particularly of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment made famous to non-Civil War students by the movie Glory several years ago.

The 54th Massachusetts was the first black regiment to march from the North to fight the Confederacy. These men were quite brave knowing that in battle they would likely get little or no quarter, and if captured they would most assuredly be sent south back to slavery. These men had much to prove what with years of racism from North and South to be broken and defeated by their bravery and sacrifices not to mention the Confederate army that they would later face on the battlefield. They would win ever-lasting fame for their courage during their doomed assault on Fort Wagner at Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, July, 1863. The attack would be a night assault on this heavily guarded fort. The fighting would be intense and the 54th would not be successful. Their white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw would be killed, and almost half the regiment would be lost. The first Medal of Honor for a black man would be earned there.

They marched down Beacon Street, with the Massachusetts State House on one side and Boston Common on the other – off to war, off to death and glory on a twin mission; to fight for the Union and show the world that they were equal in ability to whites. Directly across the street from the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Street there now stands the brilliant monument by Augustus St. Gaudens forever commemorating the 54th, the first black regiment and their white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, Colonel, 54th Massachusetts

This monument on Beacon Hill is one of the finest monuments of any kind in the United States. As a tribute to Shaw and the 54th it is unparalled in the physical world; but in the emotional world, the world of poetry, Robert Lowell comes quite close. Lowell brilliantly describes the monument to the 54th and works it into the life of Boston that foremost of abolition cities of the North. Standing before the 54th monument on Beacon Hill, as the crowds walk swiftly by and the traffic speeds along past the State House, one can almost hear the men breath as they are forever frozen in bronze on their march south to battle. There are few monuments in bronze as lifelike as this one: it is an incredible tribute to the 54th and their commander and adorns the city of Boston as fittingly as the obelisk at Bunker Hill or the colonial historical sites of Adams, Revere, Hancock, and several miles to the west, Lexington and Concord.

Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” is a successful poem on so many levels and succeeds completely where Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” so totally fails. It unifies time and place, and brings context and permanence where everything seems to be shifting and changing. As a tribute to the 54th and the Union dead of the Civil War its elements run as deep as the waters off the coast of Boston seen from the top of Beacon Hill so long ago when the skyscrapers didn’t block the view.

Having started his education at Harvard Lowell transfered to Kenyon College to study under John Crowe Ransom another of Vanderbilt’s Fugitives, like Allen Tate and Donald Davidson. It is an astounding thing that the two greatest Civil War poems of modern times (“Lee in the Mountains” and “For the Union Dead”) and the worst (“Ode to the Confederate Dead”) should be written by poets with Nashville connections. Lowell went on to graduate school to study under Robert Penn Warren, another Vanderbilt “Fugitive”.

St. Gaudens placed a latin inscription on the monument, the motto of the Society of the Cincinnati (a society of Revolutionary War officers started by George Washington and Henry Knox): “Relinquit Omnia Servare Rem Publicam”. The translation is: “He left behind everything to save the Republic”. Lowell opened his poem with this latin phrase but changed the singular “he” to “they” in the latin so that his poem would refer to all the men of the 54th not just its white commander, Robert Gould Shaw, to read: “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam”.

St. Gaudens’ Masterpiece – The 54th Massachusetts Marching to War – You can almost hear them breath

“For the Union Dead” was published in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights movement. Active in Civil Rights efforts it is perfectly understandable that Lowell should have written this poem of unity and appreciation with concern, too, that the past should be remembered and its lessons learned. The battlefield of Fort Wagner had been by then reclaimed by the sea at Charleston Harbor and the monument to the 54th had fallen into disrepair. In fact, it was during this time that the St. Gaudens monument had been removed and stored in a crate to prevent damage from “shaking” from the construction of the underground Boston Commons parking garage. So, the battleground is gone, and Shaw’s monunument is gone (but only temporarily), and history fades while “progress” continues speedily obliterating the memory of those that have come before.

“The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year–
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .”

Lowell’s brilliant poem is his way of retaining the past and ensuring that important historical memory is not lost forever. The men of the 54th Massachusetts, black and white, were leaders in bringing an end to slavery and establishing equality under the law for blacks in America. The story of their bravery and sacrifice is important to understanding American history and the Civil War. These men demonstrated with their actions and their blood that they were equals and merited equal positions in American society. As Americans North and South we ought to continue to embrace their memory and appreciate the many challenges that they overcame and the lessons that they taught us with their sacrifices at Fort Wagner and elsewhere.

On Martin Luther King day especially we can look back to the 54th Massachusetts as a standard bearer in the struggle for Civil Rights in America. In the 1980s I was privileged to be part of an effort to restore the St. Gaudens monument to its original beauty and power. Lowell’s poem is a tribute to this beautiful work of art, and the men of the 54th Massachusetts who so inspired it. It is our duty as a civilized society to remember our past, appreciate and commemorate our war dead, and learn those lessons that they underscored for later generations with their lives.

“Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.”

This is one of the finest poems of the 20th century and stands with “Lee in the Mountains” as one of the two great modern poems of the Civil War. It is my pleasure to present it here.

-Daniel Mallock

For the Union Dead

by Robert Lowell

“Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die–
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year–
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

54th:

http://www.nga.gov/feature/shaw/s3100.shtm

http://www.54thmass.org/54about.html

Shaw:

http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/1800sarmybiographies/p/rgshaw.htm

Monument:

http://boston.about.com/od/walkingtours/ss/bcWalkingTour_10.htm

(photo of monument: Robert Gould Shaw Memorial photo courtesy Larry Stritof © 2006.)

Allen Tate’s Failed Poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

Introduction by Daniel Mallock

“The Horror, the Horror” – Joseph Conrad

So much of modern American poetry is self-indulgent; semi-obscure, purposely confused, overly complicated, essentially tonal, and mood pieces rather than art involving substance and depth. Perhaps this is why there is an ever-shrinking audience for it and why the only lively and enthusiastic discussions on such matters take place in staid and boring academic literary journals and poetry magazines that nobody reads, or in back rooms and dark corners of downtown book stores.

This approach to poetry by poets is often a hidden disdain for the readership, and their more common place yet elegant self-referential excess of construction, imagery, metaphor and message perhaps make poetry now the art form of the elite “artistes” of academia and folks amongst the great hoi polloi who – so wanting to like poetry so wanting to see it revived and reinvigorated wait patiently for another Whitman or Poe or the like – to the poets themselves, just don’t “get it” and never can or will.

Say that you like poetry, and the response will invariably be “but, why?”

Poems that tend to drive wedges between the reader and the form itself and that are so confused in their approach that loyal fans think it means one thing while the auteur believes it means quite something else in the opposite direction – is the mark of an art form in decline. There continues a small coterie of poetry fans who still buy poetry books and talk about poets and keep the flame alive like the readers in Fahrenheit 451 who hid their books at risk of imprisonment and worse. So we wait for a Poe, another John Ashberry, and others of superb quality, but we get Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” instead with its pompous odius misdirection disguised as tribute.

Tate’s “Ode” is really neither about Confederates nor really about the dead. Additionally, it is also not “original” in the literal sense. Henry Timrod, sometimes described as the “Confederate Poet laureate” wrote an “ode” poem that actually was a tribute to the Confederate dead unlike Tate’s which was not, whether by accident, malfeasance, or design we’ll never know. Titled “Ode: Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1867″ Timrod’s poem is short, emotional, sad, honest, and most likely deeply meaningful to any audience hearing it read (or for those reading it themselves). It is not at all obscurantism like Tate’s homage to Timrod written much later, and foisted upon us as a tribute to the Confederate dead rather than simply a appalling failed poem by a famous poet.

Tate’s Ode is not a tribute, it is simply a failure. Oft-read by caring folks as a tribute to Confederates long gone, it is a mistake. According to one Williamson County, TN website, “It remains, the works of Robert Hicks and Madison Smartt Bell notwithstanding, the most important piece of literature to come out of Williamson County.” This is utterly absurd. Randall Jarrell, and David Donaldson, both Vanderbilt colleagues of Tate’s are superior poets. As a partisan for southern remembrance, having written several biographies of Confederate heroes (Jackson and Davis) Tate seems to have the requisite qualifications to have penned a great tribute poem for the Confederate dead, appropriate for graveside readings. But if he did, this is not the poem. Great artists can create bad art, happens all the time.

According to the Williamson County website mentioned above, Tate was inspired to write the Ode after a 1926 visit to the McGavock Confederate Cemetery at the Carnton Mansion which played itself an important role during the Battle of Franklin. There are almost 1500 Confederate dead in that cemetery many in mass graves that are marked only with a state designation as “125 Texas soldiers buried here” etched into a granite column. It is no insult to Tate personally to say that this is a bad poem. Contrast it with “Lee in the Mountains” or Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and you will see why. Or read Timrod’s original “Ode “. Timrod’s rings and sings true, Tate’s Ode does neither basking in its own glow and of little moment outside of its own internal context.

Tate’s poem is overdone and internally confused so that his use of powerful words that ring to everyone with any sense of respect and affection for Confederate heros would think that they are reading or hearing a tribute – but it just isn’t so. Even great poets from Vanderbilt’s famous “Fugitives” can misfire now and then. Tate’s Ode is a clear miss, much more than a misfired poem.

Mention of battle names and “Stonewall” in several lines does not a Civil War poem make. Tate clearly took this poem exceedingly seriously and that adds to the shame of it as it is simply exceedingly bad. Folks hungry for meaningful poetry about the Civil War have long heaped praise upon this conglomeration of unfortunate metaphors and falling leaves outside graveyard crypts. It’s the use of the Civil War “code words” that have made this poem so famous, and so mistakenly lauded as brilliant.

I am not the only one who feels this way. Certainly in the minority on this issue, it is good to know that I am in good company. Donald Davidson, a colleague of Tate’s at Vanderbilt and the author of the beautiful and authoritative “Lee in the Mountains” used harsh words to describe Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”. In a letter to Tate, Davidson didn’t mince any words when he said, “Your poetry, like your criticism, is so astringent that it bites and dissolves what it touches.” But this is just the beginning. Great poets can be savage critics, and when they criticize each other – yipes, watch out!

“You have decided that the opposite sort of poetry (say, an expansive poetry) can no longer be written in an age where everything is in a terrible condition. But this attitude does not merely lie behind the poetry; it gets into it, not in the form of poetry but of aesthetics, so that poem after poem of yours becomes aesthetic dissertation as much as poetry. … [W]hen you deal with things themselves, the things become a ruin and crackle like broken shards under your feet. The Confederate dead become a peg on which you hang an argument whose lines, however sonorous and beautiful in a strict proud way, leave me wondering why you wrote a poem on the subject at all, since in effect you say (and I suspect you are speaking partly to me) that no poem can be written on such a subject…

The poem is beautifully written. … But its beauty is a cold beauty. And where, O Allen Tate, are the dead? You have buried them completely out of sight – with them yourself and me. God help us, I must say. You keep on whittling your art to a finer point, but you are not whittling yourself. What is going to happen if the only poetry you can allow your conscience to approve is a poetry of argument and despair. Fine as such a poetry may be, is it not a Pyrrhic victory?”

I’ve often found myself asking the same question that Davidson did so many years previously, why did Tate write this poem nominally about the Confederate dead when they are so glossed over? Why choose the Confederate dead as the title? It’s a bait-and-switch, typical of bad art.

There are so many failures in this poem that discussing them all could fill a book, which is not my desire. As a poem it’s a mish-mash confabulation of unfortunate images and metaphors utterly out of sync and described confusedly, without context and with little respect of history or reality. This poem doesn’t sing, it scrapes itself across the blackboard of the mind making that abysmal irritating screeching sound so familiar to every school child all the while!

Observe the poem as a Civil War historian, as someone who appreciates the sacrifices of American soldiers in past wars; think about how this poem would sound read over the graves of heroes – and be appalled…

“Unfortunate” is merely the most kind word to use here, but not at all the most accurate. Read the following section from Tate’s Ode, and ask yourself if the imagery is all wrong, confused, negative, insulting, grotesque.

“What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;”

The above bizarre cacophony of images of the rotting dead, and gray spiders (Confederate spiders… huh?) and unclean bones is but only part of the many assaults upon the reader by Tate. How can Confederate bones in a poem supposed by so many to be a tribute be unclean? The bones of our American war dead, Confederate and Union, cannot be unclean! Tate’s imagery is vile.

These are not the words of commemoration of loss or sadness or of appreciation. This is no veneration appreciation of the sacrifices of the Confederate dead! These are words that reduce the dead to their very bones and shiver their accomplishments out of context from their lives so that the only thing remaining in the poem to mark their lives are the Confederate gray spiders to be trodden under foot and screamed at by little girls and old women.

Observe the Civil War code words in the following lines in this also muddled and bizarre section, these are the source of this poem’s longevity and also the source of so much misunderstanding:

“Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.”

There is false mystery here, and fake sentiment. Confederate infantry is not “inscrutable”. The dead at Franklin are there because of a specific historic event, the battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864. Confederate infantry are not demons. “Demons”? Did Tate actually suggest here that Confederate infantrymen are “demons”?? This is misery and absurdity rolled all together into an abysmal ball thrown at people on dark and sad occasions thinking that they are giving tribute/paying tribute to lost heroes but are instead indulging a poet his awful and unfortunate mistake of a poem. Why on earth would “I/you” curse the setting sun? Should I curse the setting sun for all the horrible Confederate losses during the war or do I curse the setting sun because I am sad at the deaths of brave men resting in the cemetery? No, in Tate’s twisted-up version the men are not resting at all in the cemetery, they are “rising” – oh, you know, like gray spiders.

“Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.”

Can anyone listening to a recitation of this abysmal monstrosity of a poem truly believe that it is a tribute to dead Confederate soldiers when they are described as “gray spiders”, and “demons”? No!

Never has a more unfortunate mess been foisted upon a caring public so desperate for ways to honor the bravery of their forebears. Tate’s poem “ode to the Confederate Dead” is not the way. This poem should be rendered asunder and banished into the black holes of obscurity where it belongs. Mind you, this is not a condemnation of all of Tate’s work merely this one poem so wrongly portrayed as an appropriate commemoration of Confederate dead (even read at Confederate cemeteries!) while it is not all such a thing.

A poem can fail for so many reasons. Davidson was so right when he wrote, “The poem is beautifully written. … But its beauty is a cold beauty. And where, O Allen Tate, are the dead? You have buried them completely out of sight – with them yourself and me.” The poem reads “well” as do most poems written by an accomplished poet such as Tate. But it is cold, and heartless.

There is no care for the Confederate dead here, in fact they don’t even appear in the poem but as demons and spiders. The heroes are converted to the ugliest of images, and the sacrifices and losses ignored, while the poet plays his literary games with metre and rhythm and names of battles – clearly meaningless to him, but hooks for the audience like a bad ABBA tune’s irresistible hook.

But I do not care a whit about Tate’s internal poetics or his “music”, I want a Civil War poem that is an Ode to the Confederate Dead, a tribute and appreciation. This is the manner that this poem has always been sold to me through my life, having been read at Civil War events with the direst and humblest of tones. But I’ve been sold a bill of goods and been cheated throughout my life and now the truth needs to be told so that future generations are not so abused as I have been by this wretched poem.

Ode to the Confederate Dead
by Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.

Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!–
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge

You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know–the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision–
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.

Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl’s tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing:
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?

Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush–
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

Tate poem courtesy of Poets.org

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.

A Poem on the Battle of Franklin, TN, November 30, 1864

we’re almost home

by Daniel Mallock

cool springs’ and franklin’s office blocks
are lit up at night, waiting

some time ago, troops marched close
and came so close to home

down winstead hill – straight lines, flags and
banners, bayonets, hope.

rabbits rush ahead into blue
lines steeled, awed, waiting.

cool winter breeze moves flags, young men
dream of home, love, and life

night shadows move across franklin
so calm, grand, almost home

blue and gray in the night light fire
turn hot and cold and red

bullets, cannon, sword, screaming shouts
guns with lurid sharp flames

last and first prayers to God to
mother father somewhere

away far from franklin’s red fields
where hare are slow, alive.

at the works they die in straight lines
on the top adams’ horse

is a monument, at the base
of the works blood is deep

behind the works children scream and
from their cellar see hell

hear it, smell it, are forever
shattered, wounded, haunted.

the dead lay for days on franklin’s
winter fields almost home

they lie in straight lines in franklin
red sticks for adams and cleburne

in cool springs there is little time
for old wars and dead heroes

morning is coming to franklin
lights low, almost home now

carnton is still. wind moves the trees
like flags on franklin’s fields.