Fiends who in the lurid gloom
Of Hell do ply the fatal loom,
Weave a banner of despair
For Columbia’s tainted air,
Like the boding raven’s wing
All the land o’ershadowing.
In the murky woof embroider
Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder.
On the fatal standard show
Every form of guilt and woe—
Murder drinking deep of blood,
Rolling round him like a flood,
All the fetid gall that drips
From the land’s infected lips,
In the murky woof embroider
Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder.
Weave ye in the magic loom
Piles of slain without a tomb,
Cities lit with midnight fires,
Crashing walls and toppling spires,
Famine’s sunken, ghastly cheek,
Outraged woman’s helpless shriek,
Hoary age and infancy
Plunged in one wide misery;
In the murky woof embroider
Darkness, death, and Hell’s disorder.
Let the banner’s fold be bound
With a fiery serpent round;
Eden’s destroyer shall recall
The new temptation, sin, and fall.
We have changed the stripes of flame
To the burning blush of shame,
And the streaks of spotless white
To the pallor of affright,
And the stars which blazoned all
To Wormwood in its endless fall.
The song of treason ceased—the phantoms fled,
And as I mused in the dark bitterness
Of grief to this sad prophecy of woe,
I heard a sound, as when the ocean moves
His moist battalions to the tempest’s march,
To storm the fortress of the rocky isles,
And hosts innumerable thronged around
In panoply of war. From every height
And every valley rolled the martial drum,
And bugles calling to the gory charge
The loyal and the bold, while streamed on high
Gay banners glittering with the hues of heaven.
“We come, oh, bleeding country,” was their cry,
“To beat aside the parricidal steel,
And shield the snowy breast that gave us life.”
New England’s seamen swelled the rallying cry
Along the coasts; the Middle States replied
From thronging marts; the echoes leaped along
The Mississippi Valley, whose vast floods
Throb like the pulses of the Nation’s heart,
And pale Virginia, all besprinkled now
With War’s red baptism, to Kentucky spoke;
Kentucky, tried but faithful unto death,
To sad Missouri called; Missouri passed
The kindling watchword to the vast Northwest,
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Who louder sang than Niagara’s roar
To the unconquered heights of Tennessee;
Hoarse echoes, like the low sepulchral moan
Of subterranean fires, disturbed the Gulf—
The bleeding Gulf betrayed and overawed—
Then swelling loud as an Archangel’s trump,
Or shrill winds piping o’er the stormy flood,
It thundered back from far Pacific’s coast.
Come to the tombs by mourning millions thronged
Beneath the oak of weeping. Glorious dead,
Fame’s cemetery holds no hero dust
More dearly honored in sublime repose.
Pale ashes, with a nation’s tears bedewed,
And fanned by sighs as numerous as the winds,
The laurels that you nurture shall be green
And bloom forever round the precious urns
Of Baker and Lyon. Fortune smiled
Upon them, casting from her ample lap,
Her lavish stores of fame and wealth and ease,
And wooed them to repose. Though sweet her song,
She sang unheeded. Honor, fortune, life
They offered freely on their country’s shrine,
In the red heat and fury of the fight,
Deeming the dearest jewels of the world
Were nought when weighed against the nation’s life.
Dirge.
He who led our faltering ranks
Up the ambuscaded banks—
He who poured his heart’s red rain
Over Springfield’s stormy plain,
Heeding not the volleys deadly
Nor the life’s blood running redly,
Cold in death shall lead no more
Where our country’s eagles soar.
Such, oh War, thy fearful pleasure,
Priceless blood and costliest treasure,
Still the victims whom thou smitest
Are the loveliest and the brightest.
But the martyrs shall be glorious
When our flag returns victorious;
Death, who seals such patriot eyes,
Opens them in Paradise.