One moment on the quarter-deck Jock kneels
Beside his Commodore and fighting squad.
Their heads are bowed, their prayers go up toward God—
Toward God, to whom appeals
Still rise in pain and mangling wrath from blind ordeals.
Of man, still boastful of his brother’s blood.—
They stand from prayer. Swift comes and silently
The enemy.
Macdonough holds his men, alert, devout:
“He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea
Driven with the wind. Behold the ships, that be
So great, are turned about
Even with a little helm.” Jock tightens the blue clout
Around his waist, and watches casually
Close-by a game-cock, in a coop, who stirs
And spreads his spurs.
Now, bristling near, the British war-birds swoop
Wings, and the Yankee Eagle screams in fire;
The English Linnet answers, aiming higher,
And crash along Jock’s poop
Her hurtling shot of iron crackles the game-cock’s coop,
Where, lo! the ribald cock, like a town crier
Strutting a gunslide, flaps to the cheering crew—
Yankee-doodle-doo!
Boys yell, and yapping laughter fills the roar:
“You bet we’ll do ’em!” “You’re a prophet, cocky!”
“Hooray, old rooster!” “Hip, hip, hip!” cries Jockie.
Calmly the Commodore
Touches his cannon’s fuse and fires a twenty-four.
Smoke belches black. “Huzza! That’s blowed ’em pocky!”
And Downie’s men, like pins before the bowling,
Fall scatter-rolling.
Boom! flash the long guns, echoed by the galleys.
The Confiance, wind-baffled in the bay
With both her port-bow anchors torn away,
Flutters, but proudly rallies
To broadside, while her gunboats range the water-alleys.
Then Downie grips Macdonough in the fray,
And double-shotted from his roaring flail
Hurls the black hail.
The hail turns red, and drips in the hot gloom.
Jock snuffs the reek and spits it from his mouth
And grapples with great winds. The winds blow south,
And scent of lilac bloom
Steals from his mother’s porch in his still sleeping-room.
Lilacs! But now it stinks of blood and drouth!
He staggers up, and stares at blinding light:
“God! This is fight!”
Fight! The sharp loathing retches in his loins;
He gulps the black air, like a drowner swimming,
Where little round suns in a dance go rimming
The dark with golden coins;
Round him and round the splintering masts and jangled quoins
Reel, rattling, and overhead he hears the hymning—
Lonely and loud—of ululating choirs
Strangling with wires.
Fight! But no more the roll of chanting drums,
The fifing flare, the flags, the magic spume
Filling his spirit with a wild perfume;
Now noisome anguish numbs
His sense, that mocks and leers at monstrous vacuums.
Whang! splits the spanker near him, and the boom
Crushes Macdonough, in a jumbled wreck,
Stunned on the deck.
No time to glance where wounded leaders lie,
Or think on fallen sparrows in the storm—
Only to fight! The prone commander’s form
Stirs, rises stumblingly,
And gropes where, under shrieking grape and musketry,
Men’s bodies wamble like a mangled swarm
Of bees. He bends to sight his gun again,
Bleeding, and then—
Oh, out of void and old oblivion
And reptile slime first rose Apollo’s head;
And God in likeness of Himself, ’tis said,
Created such an one,
Now shaping Shakespeare’s forehead, now Napoleon,
Various, by infinite invention bred,
In His own image molding beautiful
The human skull.