Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 10

Poetic Responses to
the Civil War
By Rob Velella
The Civil War changed literature in the United
States, as it changed most other aspects of American culture
and society. People were deeply affected by the massive
bloodshed, the opposing ideologies, and the patriotic fervor,
and nearly every family in the country was impacted by the
conflict. The writers now buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery
were no exception.
The first clarion call of the Civil War came from Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poem “Paul Revere’s Ride”
was published just as the Confederacy was being formed. In
such a confusing time, Longfellow called to mind a history
in which people came together to fight side-by-side for
a common cause. The factual account of the historic Paul
Revere, which Longfellow certainly knew, was ignored for
the more important symbolic message that “the fate of a
nation was riding that night” with a spark that “kindled the
land into flame with its heat.” In that hour of darkness, peril,
and need, Longfellow imagined, the people would waken
and listen to the message of a dedicated individual whose
patriotism brought the people
together.
During the Civil War, this
was the kind of poetry that
prevailed: poems that bordered
on military recruitment
propaganda. Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Longfellow’s friend
and fellow Harvard professor,
joined the fray. Like Longfellow,
he had a son who joined the
Union Army and saw action,
making it hard to ignore the
conflict. One of his best poems
of the period, “Never or Now,”
is also inspired by the Founders’
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
generation and is more explicitly
Lot 2147 Lime Avenue
a call to enlist:
Listen, young heroes! your country is calling!
Time strikes the hour for the brave and the true!
Now, while the foremost are fighting and falling,
Fill up the ranks that have opened for you!
The much younger poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich was
the right age to become a soldier. When no appointment
came through, he instead became a war correspondent
and witnessed the havoc firsthand. By mid-war, his readers
were less inclined to rush into battle, patriotism notwith-
standing, as they faced the likelihood of death. Aldrich’s
8 | Sweet Auburn
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 580 Indian Ridge Path
most well-known poem of the war period, a sonnet titled
“Fredericksburg,” exemplifies this second phase of the Civil
War, a period in which literature more carefully expressed
the reality of battle:
The increasing moonlight drifts across my bed,
And on the churchyard by the road, I know
It falls as white and noiselessly as snow.
‘Twas such a night two weary summers fled;
The stars, as now, were waning overhead.
Listen! Again the shrill-lipped bugles blow
Where the swift currents of the river flow
Past Fredericksburg; far off the heavens are red
With sudden conflagration; on yon height,
Linstock in hand, the gunners hold their breath;
A signal rocket pierces the dense night,
Flings its spent stars upon the town beneath:
Hark! – the artillery massing on the right,
Hark! – the black squadrons wheeling down to Death!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Lot 6109 Grapevine Path
Similarly, poet and artist Christopher Pearse Cranch
expressed a deflated sense of patriotism in his sequence
“Poems of the War.” His poem marking the end of the
war, “The Dawn of Peace,” offers a judgmental assessment
of his fellow Southerners (he was born in Virginia before
relocating to New England) as traitors affected by “evil
compacts” and “brutal laws.” But the cost, he notes, for this