15
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown
bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading
filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the
swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the
night.
While my sight that was bound in my
eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of
battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles
and pierc'd with missiles I saw
them,
And carried hither and yon through
the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the
staffs, (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men,
I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the
slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they
suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the
mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing
comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.