Walt Whitman Rips Into Politicians

Walt Whitman had equal loathing for politicians of North and South, and blamed both for the horrors of the Civil War. This is just the beginning of his tirade, which he suggests is only part of the story and is worth "conning" now and in the future. I think it describes the slime mold of the U.S. Congress today quite well ... I add a link to the complete Whitman piece.

       ORIGINS OF ATTEMPTED SECESSION

Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and any day.

I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860-'65, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity—perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really become fused, homogeneous and lasting. The origin and conditions out of which it arose, are full of lessons, full of warnings yet to the Republic—and always will be. The underlying and principal of those origins are yet singularly ignored. The Northern States were really just as responsible for that war, (in its precedents, foundations, instigations,) as the South. Let me try to give my view. From the age of 21 to 40, (1840-'60,) I was interested in the political movements of the land, not so much as a participant, but as an observer, and a regular voter at the elections. I think I was conversant with the springs of action, and their workings, not only in New York city and Brooklyn, but understood them in the whole country, as I had made leisurely tours through all the middle States, and partially through the western and southern, and down to New Orleans, in which city I resided for some time. (I was there at the close of the Mexican war—saw and talk'd with General Taylor, and the other generals and officers, who were feted and detain'd several days on their return victorious from that expedition.)


Of course many and very contradictory things, specialties, developments, constitutional views, &c., went to make up the origin of the war—but the most significant general fact can be best indicated and stated as follows: For twenty-five years previous to the outbreak, the controling "Democratic" nominating conventions of our Republic—starting from their primaries in wards or districts, and so expanding to counties, powerful cities, States, and to the great Presidential nominating conventions—were getting to represent and be composed of more and more putrid and dangerous materials. Let me give a schedule, or list, of one of these representative conventions for a long time before, and inclusive of, that which nominated Buchanan. (Remember they had come to be the fountains and tissues of the American body politic, forming, as it were, the whole blood, legislation, office-holding, &c.) One of these conventions, from 1840 to '60, exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except in our own age and in these States. The members who composed it were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses, marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President's house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch'd at midnight; from political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; and from the running sores of the great cities. Such, I say, form'd, or absolutely controll'd the forming of, the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, State, and National politics—substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding everything—legislation, nominations, elections, "public sentiment," &c.—while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and traders, were helpless in their gripe. These conditions were mostly prevalent in the north and west, and especially in New York and Philadelphia cities; and the southern leaders, (bad enough, but of a far higher order,) struck hands and affiliated with, and used them. Is it strange that a thunder-storm follow'd such morbid and stifling cloud-strata?

Read Whitman's Prose at Project Gutenberg   

The Day They Fired Walt Whitman

On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author [Walt Whitman] was
dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he
had held for six months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal
was the act of the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department,
formerly a Methodist clergyman, and President of a Western college.

Upon the interrogation of an eminent officer of the Government, at whose
instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr.
Harlan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the
discharge of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could
learn, his conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few
months of his tenure of office, he had been promoted. The sole and only
cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had written the
book of poetry entitled Leaves of Grass. This book Mr. Harlan
characterized as “full of indecent passages.” The author, he said, was
“a very bad man,” a “Free-Lover.” Argument being had upon these
propositions, Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly unable to
maintain his assertions; and, as regards the author, was forced to own
that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this
substantial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke
his action. Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the
proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into office under
Mr. Harlan: but the demand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the
gentleman who made it, as the refusal to accede to it was discreditable
to the Secretary.

The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct
consequence of Mr. Harlan’s course, was its remission to the scurrilous,
and in some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To
sum up, an author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago,
of an honest book, which no intelligent and candid person can regard as
hurtful to morality, was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held
up to public contumely by the newspapers. It remains only to be added
here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon assuming the
control of the Department, published a manifesto, announcing that it was
thenceforth to be governed upon the principles of Christian
civilization.
— William Douglas O'Connor, The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication. 1866

Photo of Walt Whitman by Matthew Brady, Wikimedia Commons.

Knecht Ruprecht, or The Bad Boy's Christmas

by Brett Rutherford

Don’t even think of calling your

mother or father.

They can't hear you.

No one can help you now.

I came through the chimney

in the form of a crow.

You are my first this Christmas.

You are a very special boy, you know.

You have been bad,

bad every day,

dreamt every night

of the next day’s evil.

It takes a lot of knack

to give others misery

for three hundred and sixty

consecutive days!

How many boys have you beaten,

how many small animals killed?

Half the pets in this town

have scars from meeting you.

Am I Santa Claus? Cack, ack, ack!

Do I look like Santa, you little shit?

Look at my bare-bone skull,

my eyes like black jelly,

my tattered shroud.

My name is Ruprecht,

Knecht Ruprecht.

I am Santa’s cousin! Cack, ack, ack!

Do stop squirming and listen —

(of course I am hurting you!)

I have a lot of visits to make.

My coffin is moored to your chimney.

My vultures are freezing their beaks off.

But as I said, you are special.

You are my number one boy.

When you grow up,

you are going to be a noxious skinhead,

maybe a famous assassin.

Your teachers are already afraid of you.

In a year or two you will discover girls,

a whole new dimension of cruelty and pleasure.

Now let us get down to business.

Let me get my bag here.

Presents? Presents! Cack, ack, ack!

See these things? They are old,

old as the Inquisition,

make dental instruments look like toys.

No, nothing much, no permanent harm.

I shall take a few of your teeth,

and then I shall put them back.

This is going to hurt. There —

the clamp is in place.

Let's see now — where may I plug in

those electrodes?

Oh, now, do not whimper and pray to God!

As if you ever believed in God! Cack, ack, ack!

I know every tender place in a boy’s body.

There, that’s fine! My, look at the blood!

Look at the blood! Look at the blood!

You’ll be good from now on? That’s a laugh.

Am I doing this to teach you a lesson?

I am the Punisher. I do this

because I enjoy it! I am just like you!

There is nothing you can do!

I can make a moment of pain seem like a year!

No one will ever believe you!

Worse yet, you cannot change.

Tomorrow you will be more hateful than ever.

The world will wish you had never been born.

Well now, our time is up. Sorry for the mess.

Tell your mother you had a nosebleed.

Your father is giving you a hunting knife

for which I am sure you will have a thousand uses.

Just let me lick those tears from your cheeks.

I do love the taste of children's tears.

My, it is late! Time to fly! Cack, ack, ack!

I shall be back next Christmas Eve!

— Revised October 2019

_______

Knecht Ruprecht, from German folklore, is St. Nicholas' evil twin, who punishes bad children.

The Sorcerer's Complaint

by Brett Rutherford


for Barbara Holland

There is no use deceiving her.

Her hooded eyes, in shadow, see

each shade and its dim penumbra.

Drinking lapsang souchong

tea at my Sixth Avenue loft,

she spies the nightshade, the wolfbane,

purpling the herbal window sill.

At pre-dawn hour when all others slumber,

she skulks by, just when my illegal pet

happens to dangle a tangible limb

out and then down the fire escape, three floors.

No one was meant to see that tentacle

as it lowered trash to the waiting can!

When she joins in my poetry circle,

my Siamese cat athwart her lap-book,

her balletic toe lifts up the carpet,

revealing last night’s chalked-in Pentagram.

“Really!” she chides. “Demons don’t answer calls

that easily, and I should know.”

From sidewalk she called, “Are you on fire, or what?”

that night my more musty conjurations

failed to clear the chimney top and gasped

out every window of my loft.

“Nothing to see!” I shouted down at her,

“A meatloaf did not survive the oven!”

Somehow one shard of carbon-clot

detached and followed her, and stayed —

I let it, to punish her being so much

in the way of learning my business.

Yet she is obstinate. My tea and talk

are just too much to her liking, so back

she comes, her raccoon-collar coat turned up

against the cloud that hovers there,

on my command. Week after week,

that black and personal drizzle hounds

her Monday walks through Chelsea streets.

Umbrellas are of no avail;
they leak into her mouse-brown hair.
Wind blows the rain sideways at her

as she hurls herself among
bus shelters and doorway awnings.

There is no waiting out the storm.

The manual of sorcery explains:

it is easier to start bad weather,

than to stop it.

[Revised May 2019].

(c 1972, new version Nov 2018)

The Doll With No Face

By Brett Rutherford

One tea-and-cookies Sunday, she had more time
to spend with me, the youngest son's first child.
As I sat, lap full of Classic Comics,
grandmother Rutherford rummaged away
in the unseen kitchen. "Where? Where?" she asked.
Wood drawers slid. Cabinets squeaked open.
"Ah! Don't slip away — I found it again."

She cleared the tea table. "More, please!" I asked,
and held the tea cup out. She poured, I poised
the full teacup and watched the pot vanish
onto a sideboard. She put a bag before me,
soft, suede, brown the color of the oak leaves
that still clung rabidly to the trees outside.

It was tied with a leather cord, cram-full
of objects that tumbled out. Small things first:|
shiny white shells, water-worn colored agates,
black arrowheads, a bronze scrap verdigris'd,
a miscellany of seeds and pods, dried
leaves and petals long past the hint of hue.

"It's like my rock collection!" I offered.
"Agates like that I get from Jacob's Creek."
She pushes that one aside, holds the black
arrowhead in the palm of her hand, "Sharp-
edged black glass, good for arrows," she said.
"That's how my mother explained it." She ran
the edge along her cheek. I shuddered then,
and told her "Obsidian! Volcanic
glass. I find it in the road-fill. Aztecs
used it to cut out hearts. Sharp as a saw
a surgeon's saw." — "You know too much for ten.
Your teachers don't understand you, I hear.
That's why I can say things no one should know
until they're old, and far away, remembering."

She reached into the bag, removed the doll,
an almost weightless thing of cornhusks.
It had a dress, blue-printed calico,
delicate red shoes, a beaded hat, braids
made of corn-silk, blond white. Its rounded head
was pulled tight with cloth, but hard as a stone —
no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth, no name
one could call it, or any name one wished.

"Boy: these are the things my mother left me."
She left a long silence for that to sink in.
"Things that my mother's mother left to her."

"The family called themselves White. Took her
in, a young girl, Indian braids and all.
No one was what they said they were: Stouffel
White was Christopher Weiss in Germany.
Henry White, the son whose big farm it was,
had many children, hands to work and pray.
One more was easy to take in. A lot
of Mingos and Senecas were going West,
driven from New York State, driven from here.
Many who could pass, they just took white names
and settled out in the hills and hollows.
Some had their children taken out to school,
some women married whites who didn't want
an Indian man's children, so gave them up."

She went to the sideboard, a drawer pulled.
"Here" — a stern old woman in widow's black —
"is how she looked when she came to live with us.
I never called her anything but 'Ma",
or 'Mrs. Trader' to the neighborhood.
Ten years they had lived in Allegheny,
across the river from Pittsburgh, chairman
of some company board he was — died there
and she came on home. None of us did church
except for Christmas, and neither did she.

"You didn't talk about being a Mingo.
It was bad enough when the first war came
to never say the White name came from Weiss.
But then she just told everyone: not White,
not Weiss, she was an Indian, plain and true.
We laughed. She tried to change her clothing then,
bought beads and buttons and Indian scarves.
My husband was furious. Our children
were called names and ridiculed, but instead
of a thing of shame it became a pride.

"One day she sat on the front porch with me.
She had this brown bag and the things in it.
'Sharp-edged black glass — this is good for arrows,'
she told me, as one by one she brought out
the rocks, the shells, the copper shard, this flint
she said came all the way from Michigan.
This from our fathers' fathers, a bone thing
from a raccoon's private parts, and magic.
She had a name for each thing, and a place,
all in her mish-mash Mingo-Delaware.

"Then came this doll, this doll without a face.
I never saw her cry but once, and this
was it. She didn't let me play with it,
just held it on her lap and said, 'Listen.
Remember. My mother gave me this doll
the day she left me at the White farmhouse.
She'd be away a while she said, and I
must look at her face, then at the doll's face,
then at her face and at the doll's again,
till when I saw its emptiness I saw
her grieved face, her deep black eyes,
     her forced smile.
Just keep the doll with you till I return.

'The Whites were kind, but I worked hard,
Kept to myself and sang my own music,
played in the woods with the named animals
I knew from my mother's teachings. Three girls
I played with, not quite as sisters. They scorned
my poor clothing, my stubborn braids. Ma White
took all my clothes one night and gave a hand-
me down dress and underclothes and new shoes.
I was less an outcast now. No Sunday
Church for me, but we would play with our dolls.
Their dolls had porcelain faces, with eyes
and noses and ruby lips and blushes.

'My doll — it had only my mother's face
that only I could see, and I just smiled
as happy with my little one, as they
with theirs. Summers I'd play apart, out past
the last corn-rows where the deep woods began.
Mrs White called me but I wouldn't come.
I waited— one day each summer — she'd come.
A whippoorwill call in daytime, she'd come —
there'd be no embrace so wondrous, no eyes
so deep and dark and arrowed with sad tears,
nothing I wouldn't labor through so long
as she came with basket and moccasins,
dried fruit and candied ginger, a handful
of found rocks and feathers and agates
that looked like sunset paintings done on stone.

'Up and down and across three states she went.
Trails ran north-south and west-to-east:
Salt Lick Path to Braddock's Camp; Braddock's Road
white-written over what had been Nemacolin's Path.
She knew her way, and scavenged and traded,
did God-knows-what to get to see me each June.
When strawberries came, I knew she'd be there
calling at the wood's edge for her daughter.

'Three years it went that way. I grew. Sisters
and cousins of the Whites tormented me
for my strange ways, weird songs, and for the doll
that had no face. At night they'd turn it round
so that it wouldn't face the other dolls.
They said it gave their dolls bad dreams. I hid
it beneath my pillow, then in a box
where I feared it would suffocate. Ma White —
I could call her 'Ma' as long as the 'White'
was attached to it like an apology —
came back from town one day with a present.
A doll it was, a newer, cleaner, bright
of eye, five-fingered, five-toed, black-haired and
silver-shoed princess. She'd put to shame the dolls
my sisters had nearly wrecked with playing.

'Soon I prevailed at a porch tea party,
where my doll, Abigail, now reigned supreme.
White sisters scowled, knowing no comeuppance
could come their way before the Christmas tree
restocked the dolls with the latest fashions.
My doll was lecturing her inferiors
on the new rules of the White doll order
when, from my corner of my eye, I saw,
between two cautiously-parted branches
what might have been my mother's eyes.

'I didn't turn to look. Girl-chatter blocked
the call of the day-time whipporwill, once.
Maybe twice I heard it, but didn't go
to the wood's edge where I always met her.
Then she was there, in full sight, eyes all wide
in a wordless 'See me, daughter' greeting.
And then. O my daughter, and then,
ashamed that my sisters might glimpse her,
sun-burnt and moccasin'd with her traders'
basket and pack — I turned back to my doll
and — I — pretended —not — to — see — her.'

"This is how my mother lost her mother.
She never saw her again. In bag
she hid away the doll, the arrowheads,
stones, feathers, dried blossoms and raccoon bones.
No longer could she see her mother's face
on the wrapped rock that was the corn-doll's head.

"She hid who she was, until the time of remembering."

Photo: Portrait of Mary White Trader.

At the Grave of Homer

by Brett Rutherford

On Ios the itchy-haired boys,
picking at head-lice like monkeys,
hectored to death the dotard Homer
as he stumbled sea-ward, hands up
to catch sun's east-west wandering,
ears to the waves to ken the echoes
and tides that guided him daily
from arbor to sea-park and home
again. "Old Man," they taunted,
"You know the gods. What color
is the hair of Aphrodite? How tall
was Aias when he stood in armor?"

Calmly, he answered them: "Bright
as spun gold. Tall as a ten-year oak."

I Dreamt I Was Dante

by Brett Rutherford

I dream in mezzanotte silver-gray,
donning the robes of aging Alighieri,
sandalled and aching with brittle legs,
heeding the call of Thanatos,
waking or sleeping?
I do not know! I feel the dew
as on my ankles, but these feet are numb,
the bony knobs and claws of an exile.
My limbs are brown and scourged
with years. An umber moon,
senile amid the drooling clouds, tilts
earthward and winks at me,
the knowing eye of eternity,
changeless and blistering.

A cypress grove, its rippled leaves
cat-furring the rigid columns of sky-
supporting trunks, the blue drear tears
of trees unbearable in daylight: how cool
they are, how wise reflecting in dew-cups
each one the tiny faces of moon and Venus
(so must we mortals, in mirror'd shields
look on the Gorgon face of Love!)

Among the trees, close-packed, a maze
formed by the slab-walls of quarry stone,
blocks of an unfinished temple to gods
the fall of an empire extinguished,
now a limestone catacomb roofed by a vault
of stars. The maze invites my errant feet
to tread its ever-regressive avenues.

At the far heart of the stone-cypress maze
in a niche cut out of purest marble,
on a pediment of onyx, Beatrice waits.
She is already dead, and I will die
before I can ever find her resting place.
That is the journey, and there is no Virgil,
and although I have read him, his silver lines
fade now to dust motes in my memory.

First H.P. Lovecraft Waterfire, Providence

by Brett Rutherford

It was in his honor, really. The band,
by god, was actually from Yuggoth.
Upon the bright stage at Steeple Street, two
rugose cones were induced to shimmy-dance
as cowled Keziah looked on approvingly.
Most of the audience, unwashed
or overly manicured, jeaned or dolled-
up for later dates at the hookah-bar,
were quite oblivious to what or whom
the puppet orchestra gave its homage.

This was H.P. Lovecraft’s first Waterfire,
art-sound-and-puppet spectacle amid
a river lit by flaming wood braziers,
as the hooded and torched participants
chanted a well-rehearsed chant to the Elder Gods,
seventy-two strong. Could Howard, misanthrope,
have ever imagined the echoing call
from bank and office tower, of words like
“Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Yog-Sothoth!”

or that a truck-size Cthulhu would barge up
the Providence River to the waiting cove?

One outraged preacher confronted the crowd:
“I rebuke you! I rebuke all of you
in the name of Jesus Christ!” And the band
played on, and the chanters chanted on,
and the stars sped on in their cold orbits,
and perhaps two lips, that smiled too seldom
curled up and inward to a skull-teethed grin
somewhere in a grave along the Seekonk.

I tried to be a celebrant, really,
but repellent hordes of ordinaries
made walking on unthinkable. Mothers
with babies. Multiple babies. Twin prams
the size of original Volkswagens
prevented my passage on the narrow,

cobbled walk. I tried. A great hound snarled, lunged,
and then, like the tricephalic hellhound
Cerberus, an apparition with three
leashed mastiffs confronted me. Then I whirled
into a noxious cloud of cigar smoke,
a toxic cloud and a man within it,
who would not let me pass. Backwards, sideways
I stepped then, as two autistic children,
one wrestled to fidgeting by his father,
the other hurling across the sidewalk,
thrust flailing limbs into my rib-cage.

I climbed a grassy slope to elude them,
looked down from afar. Most natives looked like
an undulation of stumbling spheres clad
in motley of random, unwashed laundry.

Then I came eye to eye with three young men,
(three dozen tattoos at least among them)
watching from the bed of a pickup truck,
smelling of gun oil, vomit and whiskey.
Binoculared, they eyed the Waterfire,
the celebratory burning braziers,
the fire-attendants’ barge, the silent passing
of real and faux Venetian gondolas.

Have these men have ever heard of Lovecraft?

“Saw a boat with an octopus,” one said.
“Yeah. Just flatboats with oars. The damn water
is only three feet deep ’less the tide’s up.”
“So jus’ where the hell is the Hovercraft?”
the man with binoculars demanded.
“They said there was gonna be Hovercraft!”

The Tea Party: A Childhood Memory

The Tea Party

by Brett Rutherford

Scottdale, PA, childhood on Kingview Road. (Revision of an older poem.)


New neighbor girls have settled in.
We hear the squeals and screams,
the mother-calls and father-scoldings
through the open windows.
An angry hedge divides us in back,
though our houses lean together,
shingles and sagging porches
almost blending, identical
weeds abuzz with the same
busy-body bumblebees.

The low-slung church

of solemn Mennonites

sits glum and silent

across the street.

The girls' names are Faith and Abby,

ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.

Their parents seldom speak to us.

Just up the hill, behind a fence,

white-washed and cedar-lined,

Charlene and Marilyn,

the Jewish girls

live in the great brick house

(anything brick

is a mansion to us).

I play canasta with Marilyn (my age),

learn to admire her parents,

watch as they light

the Hanukkah candles,

move among them summers

as hundreds congregate

at their swimming pool.

Their mother loves opera,

but not, she says,

not Wagner.

One August day,

an invitation comes,

crayon on tablet paper,

for tea with Faith and Abby.

My mother says, Be nice and go.

I sit in their yard

with toy furniture.

The doll whose daddy

I'm pretending to be

has one arm missing.

The tea, which is licorice

dissolved in warm water,

is served in tiny cups,

tarnished aluminum,

from a tiny aluminum teapot.

I want to gag

from the taste of it,

but I sip on and ask for more.

Now Faith addresses me.

"I'll dress the baby

and we shall take her to church." —

"Oh, we don't go to church,"

I told my newfound Mrs.

"Never, ever?"

"Not even once?" —

I shook my head —

"I've never set foot inside a church."

"That's just what Daddy told us!"

Abby exclaimed. "You'll go to Hell!"

"You'll go to Hell and be damned!"

the sisters chanted,

"You'll go to hell and be damned!"

"What else does your Daddy say?"

I asked them. "He says

you'll go to Hell and be damned,

because you're atheists and heathens."

Faith looked fierce,

She poured more tea

and made me take it,

as if it were holy water,

as if I would drink

baptism by stealth.

She raised her cup daintily,

glanced and nodded

at the fence and the cedars.

My eyes followed.

"Charlene and Marilyn

will go to Hell, too,

right to the bottom

of the flaming pit,

because they're Jews

and murdered Jesus.

Would you like ice cream now?"

The Cemetery at Eylau, 1807

THE CEMETERY AT EYLAU, 1807

by Brett Rutherford

The Battle at Eylau, East Prussia (now Bagrationovsky, Kaliningrad, Russia) As told to Victor Hugo by his uncle Louis-Joseph Hugo.Adapted and expanded from the Victor Hugo poem, "The Story of Louis-Joseph."

1.

Eylau, the graveyard in Kaliningrad, Eylau in East Prussia:
Eylau, the battle rather. Louis-Joseph was then
just Captain, and had earned the Cross, not that
it mattered in ’07 when men in war were naught
but shadows and numbers to those who counted.
He would never forget Eylau, a quiet spot
(East Prussian then), mist-clotted fields,
scant woods. The regiment before a ruined wall,
an angry old belfry frowning down Lutherly,
gravestones one could not read, slabs a-crumble
and flat, sunken and swelling in humps of grass.

Beringssen, superstitious, shuddered to stay here,
but the Emperor would not retreat, not now, while
the threat of blizzard hunched in the clouds.
Napoléon himself went by, sunglassing the sky,
calling orders as he ant-scanned the horizon.
The word spread fast in spiderweb gossip, soldier-
to-soldier: “A battle, for certain, tomorrow.”
They saw the shapes of women and children, fleeing,
huddled forms with knapsacks, potato-brown.
He looked along the ditches’ edge, anxious to hear
the rumble of horses and wagons — but silence.

In the wall’s shelter they made a campfire.
They made giant soldier-shadows, coming and going.
The colonel summoned him: “Hugo!” — “Present!” —
“How many men are with you here?” — “A hundred.” —
“A plague! That’s far too few. No matter then —

You take them all.” — “Where, Colonel?” — “Go down there
and get yourselves all killed in the graveyard.”
The captain laughed. “Down there! That is
     the very place to die.”
He had a gourd, a decent wine. He drank.
He passed it to the discerning colonel,

who savored, nodded. Their eyes met. Each understood.

A chill breeze harrowed the empty branches.
“We’re never far from Death,” the Colonel conjectured,
“Much as I love my life.” He raised the gourd again.
“Much as I love the real, we who know wine like this
know very well how to die.” Grimly, he laughed,
then swept his hand over the graveyard slope.
“Yours is the point they will menace the most.
No matter the cost — hold on. The battle’s real crux
is here.” Climbing to the wall-top, he scanned the ground.
“Have you some dry straw, at least, for bedding?” —
          “None, sir.” —
“Then on the ground it is.” Soft graves, headstones,
a sunken spot or two, they’d find a way.
— “My soldiers can sleep no matter where,” he boasted.
— “And how’s your drummer-boy?” —
          “As brave as a rooster!” —

“That’s good. So let him crow, and beat the charge
at odd times, day and night, run to and fro
so it sounds like an army is crowded in here.” —
“Did you hear that, boy?” called Hugo. A tow-head raised
from a snow-bank and cried, “Yes, sir! Fear not!
I can make enough noise for a Roman legion!”

Taking him aside, the Colonel ordered:
“It is imperative you hold this graveyard
till six tomorrow evening. Hold ground,
be you alive or dead. And thus, farewell.”
He gave a swift embrace and firm salute.

2

Leaving behind the merry fire, they scaled
the crumbling wall to down-slope cemetery.
The old gravestones and their death-headed mounds
peaked with snow-clumps, rolled on and on like waves.
The snow was far deeper than they expected.
In tattered cloaks they sank to its chill-bed.
They slept well, as men of war learn slumber
without a thought of waking, or dying.

He woke at dawn. New snow had covered him
and made his lips icy. He sat up like a revenant
from the grave-mound he had chosen, poor Johan H-
who, dead, had no choice in the manner of bunking.
He was head-to-foot in a snowy shroud.
He stood up and shook it off, shivering.
A bullet breezed by his ear. “Ho!” he shouted.
“Lookout, what see you?” — “Nothing, sir! Nothing!”
“That nothing was no housefly. Sound the reveillée!”

Up popped the nine-and-ninety heads of men
from the Lutheran ground that had never seen
such an Easter rising. The sergeant called, “To arms!”
Red dawn was split in two by inky clouds,
a bloody-mouth leer at humanity,
sun-rise, Death-rise, the lamp of War. “To arms!”

For all the horn-call and drumming, the pots-
and-pans clamor of readiness, they in their turn
got only silence from the unseen enemy.
The shot he heard was but a random thing,
much like a ballroom orchestra player
who by chance picked up a horn and blew it.

Though blood was iced, they were warm for battle.
On the plains, the silent armies waited.
The graveyard-men were set as bait and lure ,
on which the enemy might spend and waste.
They gathered along the protecting wall,
each one prepared to bleed for every foot deterred.

3.

And then it came on: six hundred field guns
roared their iron mouths, booming and thundering.
Lightning and fire-burst flashed from hill to hill.
Then Hugo’s drummer beat the charge, in answer.
A colossus of trumpets answered back.
Down came the leaden shots upon the graves,
as if the very tombs were their targets.
Starlings and crows exploded in black clouds
from the shaken church’s crumbling steeple.

One corpse but lately dead popped up half-height
as a mortar exploded his fine monument,
a preacher from the look of him, black-raimented
with a bony hand stretched out in admonition.
Skulls rolled through the snow like aimless billiards.

Then a day-defying darkness seized them.
Dawn would not give to day, the sun was shamed,
smoke rolled onto and up the slope, to wall,
o’er-reaching it, up to the church itself.
And then, in clot of gun-cloud came more snow,
a steady, head-pounding downfall of heaviness.
Soldiers against the wall were whitened ghosts,
others upon the ground a rose-burst of bleeding.
Down on the plain, fires rose from the smoke-sea —
villages now plundered were set a-light.
’til the whole horizon seemed one vast torch.

They stood against the wall, and they waited.
Till six o’clock tomorrow! the Colonel had said:
How could they make their shivering presence matter?
Not crouching this way like hares before a hunter!
“Morbleau!” said the lieutenant next to him,
“Our chance may come, and may come but once.
Let us advance now —” and then a bullet
ripped through his throat and he fell trembling, dead.

Napoléon, the Emperor, had set them here,
they knew not why, except to be a puppet show
of easy things to shoot at, a hundred armed men
pretending to be a thousand, by dint of din.
What would he tell the men? Their only goal
was to survive until a gold watch clicked on six.

He raised his sword, swinging it this way-that way.
“Courage!” he bellowed, choke-full of rage and manhood.
Out and apart from the others he stood.
He felt it not – not the thing that ripped him,
his hand limp, sword on the ground before him.
“No matter, for I have another hand,” he laughed.
He used his good hand shake the numb one,

counting fingers, all there, thanks be to God!
He took up the sword again. Soldiers’ faces blurred;
some seemed to sink and falter. “Ah, my friends,
we have left hands for the Emperor, too!”

Too soon, the boy’s drum-beating stopped. He found
the staggering drummer. “No time for fear!” —
“Six hours I’ve drummed. Six! I’m not afraid.
I’m hungry,” the drummer boy protested.
The ground rose up — like an earthquake, it seemed —
the drummer was gone — Hugo’s sword was gone.
A cry went up to heaven, coarse like crows:
Victoire, it cawed. Victoire! Victoire! Victoire!

“Let anyone who lives, stand up! Report!” —
The drummer stood. “I’m here. I didn’t die!”
The sergeant from behind a tree: “I’m here!”

The Colonel rushed in on horseback, red sword
edged with the blood of retreating Russians.
He approached, saluted. “Who won the battle, sir?” —
“You did, you, Captain Hugo. How many still live?”
And Hugo answered, “Three!”

[Revised May 2019].

Oct 25, 2018

Subjects: Eylau, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, translations

Greek and Latin Poetry -- Free Books to Download

From The Poet's Press Links Page, here are links to my recommendations for free books you can download of Greek and Roman poetry. Everyone needs a Greek slave, and a Roman master.

GREEK AND LATIN POETRY

Amos, Andrew, ed. Gems of Latin Poetry. A collection of poems in Latin from various eras (including British poems composed in Latin). An excellent bilingual resource with the original Latin, prose  or verse English translations, and commentary. Odd items include a poem attributed to Julius Caesar, a Latin poem condemning Milton's works to be burned at the stake, and Latin love poems addressed to Lucrezia Borgia. A treasure trove for those searching obscure and interesting Latin poems to translate or paraphrase.  From the Internet Archive in PDF and other file formats. 

THE CLASSICS, GREEK AND LATIN: The Classics, Greek & Latin; The Most Celebrated Works of Hellenic and Roman Literature, Embracing Poetry, Romance, History, Oratory, Science, and Philosophy -- A handsome series of books published a hundred years ago, edited by a transatlantic group of scholars and translators, intended to present the great Greek and Latin classics to the general reader. The volumes are a mix of prose and verse translations. Here are the volumes that contain poetry:

• Andrew Lang's prose translation of Homer's Iliad. PDF and other formats from The Internet Archive. Lang's style is arcane, and does not compare well with Samuel Butler's prose version (see below). 
• Andrew Lang's prose translation of Homer's Odyssey. PDF and other formats from The Internet Archive. 
• From the same series, a compendium of Didactic and Lyric Poetry from the oldest Greek poets, including Hesiod, Callimachus, Sappho, Anacreon and Pindar. 
• A collection of some of the best-known Greek Dramas, including Prometheus Bound (translated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Antigone, and Medea. 
• Prose versions of The Poetry of Virgil, including The Georgics and The Aeneid. 
• The Works of Horace, translated into English prose. 
• Here is the pinnacle of Latin poetry in the volume titled, Amatory, Philosophical, Mythological. This volume includes selections from Lucretius, the great philosopher-poet, the satirist Catullus, the magisterial Propertius, and the first four parts of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 

Richardson, Leon Josiah. A Guide to Reading Latin Poetry. This brief, practical guide explains Latin meters and helps the beginner learn how to read Latin aloud, and how its classical meters work. A stodgy old book, but very useful. 
SAMUEL BUTLER'S PROSE VERSION OF HOMER'S ILIAD. Published in 1898, here is Samuel Butler's fine translation of The Iliad into clear and readable prose. This is an elegant rendering, highly readable, and far enough from our own time that Butler's everyday English sounds just slightly removed and grand.
THE RETURN OF STATIUS. Perhaps it is time for the scorned Roman poet Statius, author of the epic Thebaid, to make a comeback. He is the Stephen King of Roman poetry, full of extremes, the product of Rome at its peak of power and flowering of decadence: "Who can sing of the spectacle, the unrestrained mirth, the banqueting, the unbought feast, the lavish streams of wine? Ah, now I faint…" Here is the Heineman bilingual edition of Statius as a starter on this voluptuous poet. For a taste of the 18th century take on Statius, here is a 1767 English translation of The Thebaid Vol 1, and The Thebaid, Vol 2, whose introduction includes some comments on the critics' disapproval of Statius's unrestrained writing.