Favorite Memorial Day Poems

[DivinBreuvage]

Mine is "The Blue and the Gray" by Francis Miles Finch (1867). He was inspired by a newspaper story about the women of Columbus, Mississippi, who had turned out one day in 1866 to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers. Some Union soldiers also happened to be buried there and the women decorated their graves too -- a deed of superlative kindness and generosity from white Southerners at the time.

The Blue and the Gray

By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead; --
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
Under the one, the Blue;
Under the other, the Gray.

These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet; --
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
Under the laurel, the Blue;
Under the willow, the Gray.

From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe, --
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
Under the roses, the Blue;
Under the lilies, the Gray.

So with an equal splendor
The morning sun rays fall,
With a touch, impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all; --
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
'Broidered with gold, the Blue;
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.

So, when the summer calleth,
On forest and field of grain
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain; --
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
Wet with the rain, the Blue;
Wet with the rain, the Gray.

Sadly, but not with upbraiding,
The generous deed was done;
In the storm of the years that are fading,
No braver battle was won; --
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
Under the blossoms, the Blue;
Under the garlands, the Gray.

No more shall the war cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day; --
Love and tears for the Blue,
Tears and love for the Gray.

[Richardo]

1. "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain

Sometimes published in prose, sometimes in verse, but a heart wrenching insightful work nonetheless...

[SmokingJacket]

2. Anything by Wilfred Owen

who was killed by machine gun fire in WWI, cutting short a remarkable career.

Dulce et Decorum est (Wilfred Owen, 1917)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in.
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

[jdsmith]

8. How about Owen's "Disabled"?

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,
— In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.

There was an artist silly for his face,
For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race,
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.
One time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg,
After the matches carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. He wonders why . . .
Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts.

That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years.
Germans he scarcely thought of; and no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
To-night he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?

[Journeyman]

3. A heartfelt lesson, freedomfrog. . .

"No braver battle was won". . .
for they "banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead!"


I wish that more on this board understood the sentiment expressed in this poem. Too many here with more hate than knowledge. . . too many unwilling to forgive. No army ever fought so well for so ignoble a cause as the Gray. No army ever stood so strong for such idealized reasons as did the Blue. E pluribus unum.

[DivinBreuvage]

5. Well said.

I admit I've indulged in an anti-Confederate screed myself from time to time. I'm sure I will again. It's an emotional issue for me, as it is for many Americans to this day, black and white, north and south. But it's good to be able to set all that bitterness, anger, and self-rightousness aside once in a while and try to find a common bond of humanity.

[Journeyman]

4. why must itself up every of a park. . .

why must itself up every of a park

anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?
quote citizens unquote might otherwise
forget(to err is human;to forgive
divine)that if the quote state unquote says
"kill" killing is an act of christian love.
"Nothing" in 1944 AD
"can stand against the argument of mil
itary necessity"(generalissimo e)
and echo answers "there is no appeal
from reason"(freud)--you pays your money and
you doesn't take your choice.Ain't freedom grand


e.e. cummings


 

[heidiho]

6. Flanders Field by John McCrae

In Flanders Field the poppies grow
Beneath our crosses, row on row
That mark our place, still in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow
Loved and were loved
And now we lie
In Flanders Field

I had to memorize this in elementary school and the words still haunt me today.

[jdsmith]

7. You stop too soon

"Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high."

As Paul Fussell says, that's "recruiting-poster rhetoric."

[jdsmith]

9. For this year's war (and so many in the past), Kipling's "Common Form"

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

[DivinBreuvage]

10. Another Good One: "A Bivouac of the Dead"

Not a poem, but a surprisingly moving prose piece from the pen of the bitter and intensely cynical Ambrose Bierce. He himself was a Union veteran of the Civil War, severely wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia.

Following are excerpts; you can read the whole piece at: http://www.online-literature.com/bierce/765/

Away up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains, in Pocahontas county, West Virginia, is a beautiful little valley through which flows the east fork of the Greenbrier river. At a point where the valley road intersects the old Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, a famous thoroughfare in its day, is a post office in a farm house. The name of the place is Travelers' Repose, for it was once a tavern. Crowning some low hills within a stone's throw of the house are long lines of old Confederate fortifications, skilfully designed and so well "preserved" that an hour's work by a brigade would put them into serviceable shape for the next civil war....

A few hundred yards to the rear of the old Confederate earthworks is a wooded hill. Years ago it was not wooded. Here, among the trees and in the undergrowth, are rows of shallow depressions, discoverable by removing the accumulated forest leaves. From some of them may be taken (and reverently replaced) small thin slabs of the split stone of the country, with rude and reticent inscriptions by comrades. I found only one with a date, only one with full names of man and regiment. The entire number found was eight.

In these forgotten graves rest the Confederate dead -- between eighty and one hundred, as nearly as can be made out. Some fell in the "battle;" the majority died of disease. Two, only two, have apparently been disinterred for reburial at their homes. So neglected and obscure is this campo santo that only he upon whose farm it is -- the aged postmaster of Travelers' Repose -- appears to know about it. Men living within a mile have never heard of it. Yet other men must be still living who assisted to lay these Southern soldiers where they are, and could identify some of the graves. Is there a man, North or South, who would begrudge the expense of giving to these fallen brothers the tribute of green graves? One would rather not think so. True, there are several hundreds of such places still discoverable in the track of the great war. All the stronger is the dumb demand -- the silent plea of these fallen brothers to what is "likest God within the soul."

They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary bearers of false witness in the aftertime. They did not live through the period of honorable strife into the period of vilification -- did not pass from the iron age to the brazen -- from the era of the sword to that of the tongue and pen. Among them is no member of the Southern Historical Society. Their valor was not the fury of the non-combatant; they have no voice in the thunder of the civilians and the shouting. Not by them are impaired the dignity and infinite pathos of the Lost Cause. Give them, these blameless gentlemen, their rightful part in all the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills.

[Neecy]

11. Rupert Brooke - "The Soldier"

Also killed in WWI...

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

[DivinBreuvage]

13. I'd never read that one before, Neecy... very beautiful. n/t

[jdsmith]

14. Set Brooke's poem beside Owen's

and you can tell that Brooke died without ever seeing combat. Owen saw it, suffered from it, spent time recovering from it, and went back to his death.

Not that Brooke is an insignficant war poet--he is the most naturally talented First World War poet besides Isaac Rosenberg--but he (unlike Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg) didn't live long enough to have his subject presented to him. He's still a Romantic in the sonnet sequence of 1914.

[DivinBreuvage]

12. From Herman Melville:

SHILOH
A Requiem.
(April 1862.)

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh --
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh --
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there --
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve --
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

[gratuitous]

15. I sing of Olaf

e.e. cummings knew better than any of those bastards currently running our once-great nation into the ground.

I will not kiss your fucking flag.