First published in the Wilmington Journal, April 25, 1864.
You shudder as you think upon
The carnage of the grim report,
The desolation when we won
The inner trenches of the fort.
But there are deeds you may not know,
That scourge the pulses into strife;
Dark memories of deathless woe
Pointing the bayonet and knife.
The house is ashes where I dwelt,
Beyond the mighty inland sea;
The tombstones shattered where I knelt,
By that old church at Pointe Coupee.
The Yankee fiends, that came with fire,
Camped on the consecrated sod,
And trampled in the dust and mire
The Holy Eucharist of God!
The spot where darling mother sleeps,
Beneath the glimpse of yon sad moon,
Is crushed, with splintered marble heaps,
To stall the horse of some dragoon.
God! when I ponder that black day
It makes my frantic spirit wince;
I marched--with Longstreet--far away,
But have beheld the ravage since
The tears are hot upon my face,
When thinking what bleak fate befell
The only sister of our race--
A thing too horrible to tell.
They say that, ere her senses fled,
She rescue of her brothers cried;
Then feebly bowed her stricken head,
Too pure to live thus--so she died.
Two of those brothers heard no plea;
With their proud hearts forever still--
John shrouded by the Tennessee,
And Arthur there at Malvern Hill.
But I have heard it everywhere,
Vibrating like a passing knell;
'Tis as perpetual as the air,
And solemn as a funeral bell.
By scorched lagoon and murky swamp
My wrath was never in the lurch;
I've killed the picket in his camp,
And many a pilot on his perch.
With steady rifle, sharpened brand,
A week ago, upon my steed,
With Forrest and his warrior band,
I made the hell-hounds writhe and bleed.
You should have seen our leader go
Upon the battle's burning marge,
Swooping, like falcon, on the foe,
Heading the gray line's iron charge!
All outcasts from our ruined marts,
We heard th' undying serpent hiss,
And in the desert of our hearts
The fatal spell of Nemesis.
The Southern yell rang loud and high
The moment that we thundered in,
Smiting the demons hip and thigh,
Cleaving them to the very chin.
My right arm bared for fiercer play,
The left one held the rein in slack;
In all the fury of the fray
I sought the white man, not the black.
The dabbled clots of brain and gore
Across the swirling sabres ran;
To me each brutal visage bore
The front of one accursed man.
Throbbing along the frenzied vein,
My blood seemed kindled into song--
The death-dirge of the sacred slain,
The slogan of immortal wrong.
It glared athwart the dripping glaves,
It blazed in each avenging eye--
The thought of desecrated graves,
And some lone sister's desperate cry!
From the Rapidan--1864.
A low wind in the pines!
And a dull pain in the breast!
And oh! for the sigh of her lips and eyes--
One touch of the hand I pressed!
The slow, sad lowland wind,
It sighs through the livelong day,
While the splendid mountain breezes blow,
And the autumn is burning away.
Here the pines sigh ever above,
And the broomstraw sighs below;
And far from the bare, bleak, windy fields
Comes the note of the drowsy crow.
There the trees are crimson and gold,
Like the tints of a magical dawn,
And the slender form, in the dreamy days,
By the slow stream rambles on.
Oh, day that weighs on the heart!
Oh, wind in the dreary pines!
Does she think on me 'mid the golden hours,
Past the mountain's long blue lines?
The old house, lonely and still,
By the sad Shenandoah's waves,
Must be touched to-day by the sunshine's gleam,
As the spring flowers bloom on graves.
Oh, sunshine, flitting and sad,
Oh, wind, that forever sighs!
The hall may be bright, but my life is dark
For the sunshine of her eyes!