[In honor of the bravery and sacrifices of the soldiers of the South.]
WITH bayonets slanted in the glittering light,
With solemn roll of drums,
With star-lit banners rustling wings of might,
The knightly concourse comes!
The flower and fruit of all the tropic lands,
The unsheathed brightness of their stainless brands
Blazing in courtly hands,
One glorious soul within those thousand eyes,
One aim, one hope, one impulse from the skies,
While silent, awed and dumb,
A nation waits the end in dread surmise,
They come! they come!
The summer flaunts her vivid leaves above
The unwonted scene,
The summer heavens embrace with smiles of love
The hill-slopes green;
Far in the uppermost realms of silent air
Peace sits enthroned and happy, but on earth
The cymbals clash, and the shrill trumpets blare,
And Death, like some grim mower on the plain,
Topped by the ripened grain,
Whets his keen scythe, and shakes it fearfully!
Our serried lines march sternly to the front,
Where decked as if they rose to celebrate
A joyous festal morn,
In glistening pomp and splendid blazonry,
Slow moving as in scorn
Of those weak bands that guard the pass below,
Come gorgeous, flushed and proud, the cohorts of the foe!
They wheel! deploy, are stationed, down the cleft
Of the long gorge their signal thunders run!
A sullen answer echoes from our left
And the great fight’s begun!
O! who shall picture the immortal fray?
Our Southern host that day
Breasted the onset of the invading sea
With wills of adamant; but stern-weighted strength,
Like waves by some infernal alchemy
Hardened, transformed to solid metal, burning
At white heat as they struck, and aye returning
Hotter and more resistless than before
(All flocked atop with foam of human gore),
Pierced here and there our crumbling ranks at length,
Which as a mountain shore,
Rock-ribbed and iron founded, still had stood,
And outward hurled
In bloody sprayings, that tremendous flood
Which, with wild charge and furious brunt on brunt,
Had dashed against us like a fiery world!
Unceasing still poured on the fateful tide,
And plum
(Paul Hamilton Hayne)
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