war“ justly waged” for a just cause( Cranch here acknowledges the fight to end slavery) is a high one. He ends the poem“ Peace dawns at last. The Nation is re-born!” His optimism that the bloodshed was not for nothing carries into his sonnet“ The Death-Blow,” even as he concedes a weariness amid the chaos of the times:
… Flowers of the Union, blue and white and red, Blooming on the balcony and spire and mast, Telling us that war’ s wintry storm had fled, And spring was more than spring to us at last. To-day, – the nation’ s heart lies crushed and weak; Drooping and draped in black our banners stand. Too stunned to cry revenge, we scarce may speak The grief that chokes all utterance through the land. God is in all. With tears our eyes are dim, Yet strive through the darkness to look up to Him!
The aftermath of the Civil War was a substantial challenge— even to poetry. James Russell Lowell( Fountain Avenue) had earlier made his mark as an abolitionist poet with works like“ The Present Crisis” and“ On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves Near Washington.” During the Civil War, however, he published less poetry than he had in his youth— and certainly less significant political poetry. Still, he looked for the heroes of the battlefields, including Robert Gould Shaw( memorialized on Pine Avenue). After the fighting had ended, Lowell offered one of his most daring attempts at versifying:“ Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865.”
The poem honored those Harvard-affiliated men who had died in the conflict, even as he acknowledged his own inability to do them justice:“ Weak-winged is song,” he begins, when those who were killed wrote a“ nobler verse” in their lifeblood. Lowell, who lost three nephews in the war, struggled with its composition— a fact which is clear even in the final poem, which shaped itself as a melancholy expression
Christopher Pearce Cranch, Lot 5116 Vesper Path
James Russell Lowell, Lot 323 Fountain Avenue of regret, sadness, and despondency. In stanza VIII of the published version, he wrote:
I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, But the sad strings complain, And will not please the ear: I sweep them for a paean, but they wane Again and yet again Into a dirge, a die away, in pain. In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, Dark to the triumph which they died to gain: Fitlier may others greet the living, For me the past is unforgiving I with uncovered head Salute the sacred dead, Who went, and who return not...
Lowell’ s“ Commemoration Ode,” as it came to be known, represents the final act of Civil War – inspired poetry: how do we, as a reunited people, cope with the tragedies, the loss, the heinous acts against our fellow Americans? Some writers would romanticize the war and elevate its participants to near divinity. Others would struggle with definitions of patriotism or whether or not there was ever valor in the killing of another human being.
Even the genteel Longfellow had trouble coping with it all. In his 1866 poem“ Killed at the Ford,” he begins without romance,“ He is dead, the beautiful youth.” But the death of this soldier has repercussions off the battlefield as well, as Longfellow imagines that the bullet that killed him continued to fly and take the life of another:
And I saw in a vision how far and fleet That fatal bullet went speeding forth, Till it reached a town in the distant North, Till it reached a house in a sunny street, Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat Without a murmur, without a cry; And a bell was tolled in that far-off town, For one who had passed from cross to crown,— And the neighbors wondered that she should die.
Rob Velella is an independent literary scholar and creator of the American Literary Blog.
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