Nor reckon loss nor gain,
When men who bear our Country’s flag
Are set upon and slain.
Of her “Poems of the War” “The Flag” ranks second in popular esteem and has a place in many anthologies. She thus describes the circumstances under which it was composed:[39]
“Even in gay Newport there were sad reverberations of the strife. I shall never forget an afternoon on which I drove into town with my son, by this time a lad of fourteen, and found the main street lined with carriages, and the carriages filled with white-faced people, intent on I knew not what. Meeting a friend, I asked: ‘Why are these people here? What are they waiting for and why do they look as they do?’
“‘They are waiting for the mail. Don’t you know that we have had a dreadful reverse?’ Alas! this was the second battle of Bull Run. I have made some record of it in a poem entitled ‘The Flag,’ which I dare mention here because Mr. Emerson, on hearing it, said to me, ‘I like the architecture of that poem.’”
The opening verse is as follows:
There’s a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me
Than the blood that thrills in my bosom its earnest of liberty;
And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field of blue