John Marr and Other Poems Part 7

HERBA SANTA

I After long wars when comes release Not olive wands proclaiming peace Can import dearer share Than stems of Herba Santa hazed In autumn's Indian air.

Of moods they breathe that care disarm, They pledge us lenitive and calm.

II Shall code or creed a lure afford To win all selves to Love's accord?

When Love ordained a supper divine For the wide world of man, What bickerings o'er his gracious wine!

Then strange new feuds began.

Effectual more in lowlier way, Pacific Herb, thy sensuous plea The bristling clans of Adam sway At least to fellows.h.i.+p in thee!

Before thine altar tribal flags are furled, Fain wouldst thou make one hearthstone of the world.

III To scythe, to sceptre, pen and hod-- Yea, sodden laborers dumb; To brains overplied, to feet that plod, In solace of the _Truce of G.o.d_ The Calumet has come!

IV Ah for the world ere Raleigh's find Never that knew this suasive balm That helps when Gilead's fails to heal, Helps by an interserted charm.

Insinuous thou that through the nerve Windest the soul, and so canst win Some from repinings, some from sin, The Church's aim thou dost subserve.

The ruffled f.a.g fordone with care And brooding, G.o.d would ease this pain: Him soothest thou and smoothest down Till some content return again.

Even ruffians feel thy influence breed Saint Martin's summer in the mind, They feel this last evangel plead, As did the first, apart from creed, Be peaceful, man--be kind!

V Rejected once on higher plain, O Love supreme, to come again Can this be thine?

Again to come, and win us too In likeness of a weed That as a G.o.d didst vainly woo, As man more vainly bleed?

VI Forbear, my soul! and in thine Eastern chamber Rehea.r.s.e the dream that brings the long release: Through jasmine sweet and talismanic amber Inhaling Herba Santa in the pa.s.sive Pipe of Peace.

OFF CAPE COLONNA

Aloof they crown the foreland lone, From aloft they loftier rise-- Fair columns, in the aureole rolled From sunned Greek seas and skies.

They wax, sublimed to fancy's view, A G.o.d-like group against the blue.

Over much like G.o.ds! Serene they saw The wolf-waves board the deck, And headlong hull of Falconer, And many a deadlier wreck.

THE APPARITION _The Parthenon uplifted on its rock first challenging the view on the approach to Athens._

Abrupt the supernatural Cross, Vivid in startled air, Smote the Emperor Constantine And turned his soul's allegiance there.

With other power appealing down, Trophy of Adam's best!

If cynic minds you scarce convert, You try them, shake them, or molest.

Diogenes, that honest heart, Lived ere your date began; Thee had he seen, he might have swerved In mood nor barked so much at Man.

L'ENVOI _The Return of the Sire de Nesle._ A.D. 16

My towers at last! These rovings end, Their thirst is slaked in larger dearth: The yearning infinite recoils, For terrible is earth.

Kaf thrusts his snouted crags through fog: Araxes swells beyond his span, And knowledge poured by pilgrimage Overflows the banks of man.

But thou, my stay, thy lasting love One lonely good, let this but be!

Weary to view the wide world's swarm, But blest to fold but thee.

SUPPLEMENT

Were I fastidiously anxious for the symmetry of this book, it would close with the notes. But the times are such that patriotism--not free from solicitude--urges a claim overriding all literary scruples.

It is more than a year since the memorable surrender, but events have not yet rounded themselves into completion. Not justly can we complain of this. There has been an upheaval affecting the basis of things; to altered circ.u.mstances complicated adaptations are to be made; there are difficulties great and novel. But is Reason still waiting for Pa.s.sion to spend itself? We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians?

In view of the infinite desirableness of Re-establishment, and considering that, so far as feeling is concerned, it depends not mainly on the temper in which the South regards the North, but rather conversely; one who never was a blind adherent feels constrained to submit some thoughts, counting on the indulgence of his countrymen.

And, first, it may be said that, if among the feelings and opinions growing immediately out of a great civil convulsion, there are any which time shall modify or do away, they are presumably those of a less temperate and charitable cast.

There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan. Yet the work of Reconstruction, if admitted to be feasible at all, demands little but common sense and Christian charity. Little but these? These are much.

Some of us are concerned because as yet the South shows no penitence.

But what exactly do we mean by this? Since down to the close of the war she never confessed any for braving it, the only penitence now left her is that which springs solely from the sense of discomfiture; and since this evidently would be a contrition hypocritical, it would be unworthy in us to demand it. Certain it is that penitence, in the sense of voluntary humiliation, will never be displayed. Nor does this afford just ground for unreserved condemnation. It is enough, for all practical purposes, if the South have been taught by the terrors of civil war to feel that Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny; that both now lie buried in one grave; that her fate is linked with ours; and that together we comprise the Nation.

The clouds of heroes who battled for the Union it is needless to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people. It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Const.i.tution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.

Spite this clinging reproach, however, signal military virtues and achievements have conferred upon the Confederate arms historic fame, and upon certain of the commanders a renown extending beyond the sea--a renown which we of the North could not suppress, even if we would. In personal character, also, not a few of the military leaders of the South enforce forbearance; the memory of others the North refrains from disparaging; and some, with more or less of reluctance, she can respect. Posterity, sympathizing with our convictions, but removed from our pa.s.sions, may perhaps go farther here. If George IV could, out of the graceful instinct of a gentleman, raise an honorable monument in the great fane of Christendom over the remains of the enemy of his dynasty, Charles Edward, the invader of England and victor in the rout of Preston Pans--upon whose head the king's ancestor but one reign removed had set a price--is it probable that the granchildren of General Grant will pursue with rancor, or slur by sour neglect, the memory of Stonewall Jackson?

But the South herself is not wanting in recent histories and biographies which record the deeds of her chieftains--writings freely published at the North by loyal houses, widely read here, and with a deep though saddened interest. By students of the war such works are hailed as welcome accessories, and tending to the completeness of the record.

Supposing a happy issue out of present perplexities, then, in the generation next to come, Southerners there will be yielding allegiance to the Union, feeling all their interests bound up in it, and yet cheris.h.i.+ng unrebuked that kind of feeling for the memory of the soldiers of the fallen Confederacy that Burns, Scott, and the Ettrick Shepherd felt for the memory of the gallant clansmen ruined through their fidelity to the Stuarts--a feeling whose pa.s.sion was tempered by the poetry imbuing it, and which in no wise affected their loyalty to the Georges, and which, it may be added, indirectly contributed excellent things to literature. But, setting this view aside, dishonorable would it be in the South were she willing to abandon to shame the memory of brave men who with signal personal disinterestedness warred in her behalf, though from motives, as we believe, so deplorably astray.

Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity. The mourners who this summer bear flowers to the mounds of the Virginian and Georgian dead are, in their domestic bereavement and proud affection, as sacred in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs. And yet, in one aspect, how needless to point the contrast.

Cheris.h.i.+ng such sentiments, it will hardly occasion surprise that, in looking over the battle-pieces in the foregoing collection, I have been tempted to withdraw or modify some of them, fearful lest in presenting, though but dramatically and by way of poetic record, the pa.s.sions and epithets of civil war, I might be contributing to a bitterness which every sensible American must wish at an end. So, too, with the emotion of victory as reproduced on some pages, and particularly toward the close. It should not be construed into an exultation misapplied--an exultation as ungenerous as unwise, and made to minister, however indirectly, to that kind of censoriousness too apt to be produced in certain natures by success after trying reverses. Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.

There are excesses which marked the conflict, most of which are perhaps inseparable from a civil strife so intense and prolonged, and involving warfare in some border countries new and imperfectly civilized.

Barbarities also there were, for which the Southern people collectively can hardly be held responsible, though perpetrated by ruffians in their name. But surely other qualities--exalted ones--courage and fort.i.tude matchless, were likewise displayed, and largely; and justly may these be held the characteristic traits, and not the former.

In this view, what Northern writer, however patriotic, but must revolt from acting on paper a part any way akin to that of the live dog to the dead lion; and yet it is right to rejoice for our triumphs, so far as it may justly imply an advance for our whole country and for humanity.