O Brother! beware how you seek us again,
Lest you brand on your forehead the signet of Cain;
That blood and that crime on your conscience must sit;
We may fail, we may perish, but never submit!
The pathway that leads to the Pharisee’s door
We remember, indeed, but we tread it no more;
Preferring to turn, with the Publican’s faith,
To the path through the valley and shadow of death.
Three other poems, apparently of this month, should be mentioned in passing, as exemplifying the note of personal interest of the Southern poet in the issue of the struggle. Robert Joselyn’s “Gather! Gather!” the anonymous war song, “Come, Brothers! You are called!” and Millie Mayfield’s triumphant “We Come! We Come!” may not be poetry of the first order: nevertheless these are verses written by people to whom the threatened conflict is not a matter distant and aloof, but of intimate and vital concern.
March was a month of little action on both sides. In the North it witnessed the inauguration of Lincoln; in the South the completer organizing and unification of the Confederacy, and the beginning of negotiations by the Confederacy by which they might secure possession of Fort Sumter. If, however, the South was marking time, her poets were not. They continued to urge her on to fulfillment of her “destiny.” Indeed, this month saw written some of the very best and most resolute of her war verse. There is the indignant “Coercion,” by John C. Thompson—