Here in the midmost struggle combining--
Flags immingled and weapons crossed--
Still in union your States troop shining:
Never a star from the lustre is lost!
VII
Once more the sun deploys his rays:
Third in the trilogy of battle-days
The awful Friday comes:
A day of dread,
That should have moved with slow, averted head
And muffled feet,
Knowing what streams of pure blood shed,
What broken hearts and wounded lives must meet
Its pitiless tread.
At dawn, like monster mastiffs baying,
Federal cannon, with a din affraying,
Roused the old Stonewall brigade,
That, eagerly and undismayed,
Charged amain, to be repelled
After four hours' bitter fighting,
Forth and back, with bayonets biting;
Where in after years, the wood--
Flayed and bullet-riddled--stood
A presence ghostly, grim and stark,
With trees all withered, wasted, gray,
The place of combat night and day
Like marshaled skeletons to mark.
Anon, a lull: the troops are spelled.
No sound of guns or drums
Disturbs the air.
Only the insect-chorus faintly hums,
Chirping around the patient, sleepless dead
Scattered, or fallen in heaps all wildly spread;
Forgotten fragments left in hurried flight;
Forms that, a few hours since, were human creatures,
Now blasted of their features,
Or stamped with blank despair;
Or with dumb faces smiling as for gladness,
Though stricken by utter blight
Of motionless, inert, and hopeless sadness.
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