O, what a shout there went

The North authorized its first black regiment during the Civil War in March 1863. For the recruiting effort, poet/soldier George Henry Boker wrote a poem, "The Black Regiment," which was published on May 27, 1863 for the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Port Hudson, Louisiana — which was then under siege by the Union Army. The 2nd Louisiana Infantry, a "colored regiment," was instrumental in the siege. In his poem, Boker sees the approaching black regiment as a well-organized storm about to charge through the calm sky:

Dark as the clouds of even,
Ranked in the western heaven,
Waiting the breath that lifts
All the dread mass, and drifts
Tempest and falling brand
Over a ruined land;—
So still and orderly,
Arm to arm, knee to knee,
Waiting the great event,
Stands the black regiment.

Down the long dusky line
Teeth gleam and eyeballs shine;
And the bright bayonet,
Bristling and firmly set,
Flashed with a purpose grand,
Long ere the sharp command
Of the fierce rolling drum
Told them their time had come,
Told them what work was sent
For the black regiment.

"Now," the flag-sergeant cried,
"Though death and hell betide,
Let the whole nation see
If we are fit to be
Free in this land ; or bound
Down, like the whining hound, —
Bound with red stripes of pain
In our old chains again!"
O, what a shout there went
From the black regiment!
"Charge!" Trump and drum Swoke,
Onward the bondmen broke;
Bayonet and sabre-stroke
Vainly opposed their rush.
Through the wild battle's crush,
With but one thought aflush,
Driving their lords like chaff,
In the guns' mouths they laugh;
Or at the slippery brands
Leaping with open hands,
Down they tear man and horse,
Down in their awful course;
Trampling with bloody heel
Over the crashing steel,
All their eyes forward bent,
Rushed the black regiment.

"Freedom!" their battle-cry,—
"Freedom! or leave to die!"
Ah! and they meant the word,
Not as with us 'tis heard,
Not a mere party shout:
They gave their spirits out;
Trusted the end to God,
And on the gory sod
Rolled in triumphant blood.
Glad to strike one free blow,
Whether for weal or woe;
Glad to breathe one free breath,
Though on the lips of death.
Praying — alas! in vain!—
That they might fall again,
So they could once more see
That burst to liberty!
This was what "freedom" lent
To the black regiment.

Hundreds on hundreds fell;
But they are resting well;
Scourges and shackles strong
Never shall do them wrong.
O, to the living few,
Soldiers, be just and true!
Hail them as comrades tried;
Fight with them side by side;
Never, in field or tent,
Scorn the black regiment!

Boker: A living force, a shaping will

September 1862 turned out to be an important month in the American Civil War. After a record-breakingly bloody day at Antietam, the Union Army was able to emerge victorious. Days after the battle, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. That same day, Republican and Union supporter George Henry Boker wrote his poem "The Flag" (one of several poems chronicling the progress of the war):

Spirits of patriots, hail in heaven again
   The flag for which ye fought and died,
Now that its field, washed clear of every stain,
   Floats out in honest pride!

Free blood flows through its scarlet veins once more,
   And brighter shine its silver bars;
A deeper blue God's ether never wore
   Amongst the golden stars.

See how our earthly constellation gleams;
   And backward, flash for flash, returns
Its heavenly sisters their immortal beams
   With light that fires and burns, —

That burns because a moving soul is there,
   A living force, a shaping will,
Whose law the fate-forecasting powers of air
   Acknowledge and fulfil.

At length the day, by prophets seen of old,
   Flames on the crimsoned battle-blade;
Henceforth, O flag, no mortal bought and sold,
   Shall crouch beneath thy shade.

That shame has vanished in the darkened past,
   With all the wild chaotic wrongs
That held the struggling centuries shackled fast
   With fear's accursed thongs.

Therefore, O patriot fathers, in your eyes
   I brandish thus our banner pure:
Watch o'er us, bless us, from your peaceful skies,
   And make the issue sure!

The poem seems to reflect both an acknowledgment of the bloodshed at Antietam and the hopeful promise of freeing enslaved people. Boker invokes the Founding Fathers ("O patriot fathers") using the symbolism of the flag and implies that the contemporary generation had finished the charge of the previous one to expand freedom ("Henceforth, O flag, no mortal bought and sold"). Or, perhaps, he implies that those Founding Fathers had guided them in fulfilling that challenge.

Boker: Lay him low!

George Henry Boker recorded the Civil War from the poetic front lines. Though he was a published poet before and after the war, his lyrical tributes to battle remain his most well-known. One of his most moving, "Dirge for a Soldier," is dated September 1, 1862, and leaves the battle ground for the burial ground:

Close his eyes; his work is done!
   What to him is friend or foeman,
Rise of moon, or set of sun,
   Hand of man, or kiss of woman?
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

As man may, he fought his fight.
   Proved his truth by his endeavor;
Let him sleep in solemn night,
   Sleep forever and forever.
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

Fold him in his country's stars,
   Roll the drum and fire the volley!
What to him are all our wars,
   What but death-bemocking folly?
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

Leave him to God's watching eye;
   Trust him to the hand that made him.
Mortal love weeps idly by:
   God alone has power to aid him.
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

Who has not heard of the deeds she has done?

"Who has not heard of the dauntless Varuna?" asks Philadelphia writer George Henry Boker in one of his many poems chronicling the American Civil War. For those that have not heard of it, the Varuna was a merchant-class steamship that was appropriated for use as a Union Navy gunboat at the outbreak of the war. In April 1862, she was one of the vessels involved with a blockade of the Confederate-controlled city of New Orleans. The commanding officer, David G. Farragut, ordered the Varuna and others in a nighttime dash against the port leading to the Mississippi River on April 24, 1862. During the battle that followed, the Varuna took heavy damage, but stayed in the fight until it finally sank. Boker sung the ship's praise in "The Varuna":

Who has not heard of the dauntless Varuna?
Who has not heard of the deeds she has done?
Who shall not hear, while the brown Mississippi
Rushes along from the snow to the sun?

Crippled and leaking she entered the battle,
Sinking and burning she fought through the fray,
Crushed were her sides, and the waves ran across her,
Ere, like a death-wounded lion at bay,
Sternly she closed in the last fatal grapple,
Then in her triumph sank grandly away.

Five of the rebels, like satellites round her,
Burned in her orbit of splendor and fear;
One, like the Pleiad of mystical story,
Shot, terror-stricken, beyond her dread sphere.

We who are waiting with crowns for the victors,
Though we should offer the wealth of our store,
Load the Varuna from deck down to kelson,
Still would be niggard, such tribute to pour
On courage so boundless. It beggars possession,
It knocks for just payment at heaven's bright door.

Cherish the heroes who fought the Varuna;
Treat them as kings if they honor your way;
Succor and comfort the sick and the wounded;
Oh! for the dead, let us all kneel to pray!

Boker on Zagonyi: a cheer for thee!

Though George Henry Boker never personally took up arms during the American Civil War, he used his poetry as an active chronicler of war (and as pro-Union propaganda). One of his books, published in 1864, is entirely made up of war poems. An early poem in that book, "Zagonyi," is dated October 25, 1861. It recounts the event of that date (illustrated above) when a Hungarian-born Union officer named Charles Zagonyi led a charge against Confederate soldiers during the Battle of Springfield, Missouri:

Captain of the Body-Guard,
   I 'll troll a stave to thee !
My voice is somewhat harsh and hard,
   And rough my minstrelsy.
I've cheered until my throat is sore
For how Dupont at Beaufort bore;
   Yet here 's a cheer for thee!

I hear thy jingling spurs and reins,
   Thy sabre at thy knee;
The blood runs lighter through my veins,
   As I before me see
Thy hundred men with thrusts and blows
Ride down a thousand stubborn foes,
   The foremost led by thee.

With pistol snap and rifle crack —
   Mere salvos fired to honor thee —
Ye plunge, and stamp, and shoot, and hack
   The way your swords make free;
Then back again, — the path is wide
This time, — ye gods! it was a ride,
   The ride they took with thee!

No guardsman of the whole command
   Halts, quails, or turns to flee;
With bloody spur and steady hand
   They gallop where they see
Thy daring plume stream out ahead
O'er flying, wounded, dying, dead ;
   They can but follow thee.

So, Captain of the Body-Guard,
   I pledge a health to thee!
I hope to see thy shoulders starred,
   My Paladin; and we
Shall laugh at fortune in the fray,
Whene'er you lead your well-known way
   To death or victory!

What two poets heard that day

The First Battle of Bull Run (also called the First Battle of Manassas) was fought in Virginia on July 21, 1861; this first major land battle of the Civil War resulted in a Confederate victory. The Kentucky-born Sarah Morgan Bryan (who had recently married John James Piatt) was living nearby, outside of Washington, D.C. She wrote of the battle in her poem "Hearing the Battle":

One day in the dreamy summer,
On the Sabbath hills, from afar
We heard the solemn echoes
Of the first fierce words of war.

Ah, tell me, thou veiled Watcher
Of the storm and the calm to come,
How long by the sun or shadow
Till these noises again are dumb.

And soon in a hush and glimmer
We thought of the dark, strange fight,
Whose close in a ghastly quiet
Lay dim in the beautiful night.

Then we talk'd of coldness and pallor,
And of things with blinded eyes
That stared at the golden stillness
Of the moon in those lighted skies;

And of souls, at morning wrestling
In the dust with passion and moan,
So far away at evening
In the silence of worlds unknown.

But a delicate wind beside us
Was rustling the dusky hours,
As it gather'd the dewy odors
Of the snowy jessamine-flowers.

And I gave you a spray of the blossoms,
And said: "I shall never know
How the hearts in the land are breaking,
My dearest, unless you go."

For another perspective, Philadelphia-born George Henry Boker grabs attention in the first line of his poem "Upon the Hill Before Centreville" (also dated July 21, 1861) by almost directly answering Piatt:

I'll tell you what I heard that day:
I heard the great guns far away,
Boom after boom. Their sullen sound
Shook all the shuddering air around,
And shook, ah me! my shrinking ear,
And downward shook the hanging tear
That, in despite of manhood's pride,
Rolled o'er my face a scalding tide.
And then I prayed. O God! I prayed
As never stricken saint, who laid
His hot cheek to the holy tomb
Of Jesus, in the midnight gloom.

"What saw I?" Little. Clouds of dust;
Great files of men, with standards thrust
Against their course; dense columns crowned
With billowing steel. Then, bound on bound,
The long black lines of cannon poured
Behind the horses, streaked and gored
With sweaty speed. Anon shot by,
Like a lone meteor of the sky,
A single horseman; and he shone
His bright face on me, and was gone.

Amid "rolling drums," occasional "cheers," and the singing of "songs familiar to my ears," the speaker of the poem watches the battle much more closely than Piatt's narrator:

Beneath whose gloom of dusty smoke
The cannon flamed, the bomb-shell broke,
And the sharp rattling volley rang,
And shrapnel roared, and bullets sang,
And fierce-eyed men, with panting breath,
Toiled onward at the work of death...

Initially, the battle seemed to be in favor of the Union, and Boker's narrator briefly sees a soldier charging past who shouts that victory was theirs. He suddenly feels a stillness in the air ("All nature in the work of death / Paused for one last, despairing breath") before the battle turns in favor of the Confederates. Boker offers an ode to those Union troops who were already dead by the pause that preceded the Confederate victory:

O happy dead, who early fell,
Ye have no wretched tale to tell
Of causeless fear and coward flight,
Of victory snatched beneath your sight,
Of martial strength and honor lost,
Of mere life bought at any cost,
Of the deep, lingering mark of shame
Forever scorched on brow and name,
That no new deeds, however bright,
Shall banish from men's loathful sight!
Ye perished in your conscious pride,
Ere this vile scandal opened wide
A wound that cannot close nor heal;
Ye perished steel to levelled steel,
Stern votaries of the god of war,
Filled with his godhead to the core!
Ye died to live; these lived to die
Beneath the scorn of every eye!
How eloquent your voices sound
From the low chambers under ground!
How clear each separate title burns
From your high-set and laurelled urns!
While these, who walk about the earth,
Are blushing at their very birth;
And though they talk, and go and come,
Their moving lips are worse than dumb.
Ye sleep beneath the valley's dew,
And all the nation mourns for you.
So sleep, till God shall wake the lands!
For angels, armed with fiery brands,
Await to take you by the hands.

Much like Boker himself (who became one of the most prolific poets during the Civil War), his narrator is not merely a passive listener to the battle, as is Piatt's narrator. Instead, he suddenly shouts in the direction of battle:

I found a voice. My burning blood
Flamed up. Upon a mound I stood;
I could no more restrain my voice
Than could the prophet of God's choice.
"Back, howling fugitives," I cried,
"Back, on your wretched lives, and hide
Your shame beneath your native clay!
Or if the foe affrights you, slay
Your baser selves; and, dying, leave
Your children's tearful cheeks to grieve,
Not quail and blush, when you shall come,
Alive, to their degraded home!
Your wives will look askance with scorn;
Your boys, and infants yet unborn,
Will curse you to God's holy face!
Heaven holds no pardon in its grace
For cowards. O, are such as ye
The guardians of our liberty?
Back, if one trace of manhood still
May nerve your arm and brace your will!
You stain your country in the eyes
Of Europe and her monarchies!
The despots laugh, the peoples groan,
Man's cause is lost and overthrown!
I curse you, by the sacred blood
That freely poured its purple flood
Down Bunker's heights, on Monmouth's plain,
From Georgia to the rocks of Maine!
I curse you, by the patriot band
Whose bones are crumbling in the land!
By those who saved what these had won! —
In the high name of Washington!"

Shall I fall in love with death?

George Henry Boker concluded his 1864 collection Poems of the War with "Dirge," a poem dated November 20, 1863.

  Annie's dead, Annie's dead!
In that sentence all is said.
Lily form and rosy head,
Still and cold, yet half divine;
Though the lights no longer shine
Whence her gentle soul looked through
Its clear essence, calmly true:
Ah! the solemn inward view
Those inverted eyeballs cast,
Ere her spirit heavenward passed!
     Annie 's dead!

  Annie's dead, Annie's dead!
Sister angels, overhead,
Have your greeting hands outspread;
Let a welcome cry be given,
As she treads the skirts of heaven;
For a soul from earth more free,
More of your own purity,
Never joined your company.
Match her ye of heavenly mould,
Even thus, thus mortal cold!
     Annie's dead!

  Annie's dead, Annie's dead!
Why should this be oversaid?
Why should I abase my head? —
I who loved her from afar,
As the dreamer may the star;
I who bowed my humble eye,
Scarcely bold enough to sigh,
When she chanced to pass me by;
Trembling lest a word might stir
The high calm that reigned in her.
     Annie's dead!

  Annie's dead, Annie's dead!
But a gleam of light hath sped
Through death's shadow close and dread;
For wherever such as thou
Wanderest, must be sunshine now.
Dweller of some aery isle,
Floating up to God the while,
If I read aright that smile;
Hear aright my heart that saith,
"Shall I fall in love with death?"
     Annie's dead!

Boker: O Poet of the present day!

Born to a wealthy Philadelphia family on October 6, 1823, George Henry Boker became a poet, a playwright and, for a time, a diplomat (like his friend Bayard Taylor). Another friend, Charles Godrey Leland, noted that even as a boy, "Boker's knowledge of poetry was remarkable." His family fortune made him comfortable enough that he devoted much of his time to the pursuit of scholarly studies.

Boker, along with his group of literary friends, preferred looking to the Old World for inspiration. As Richard Henry Stoddard wrote to Boker: "Read Chaucer for strength, read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things... Get out of your age as far as you can." Boker tended to agree, and often chose not to treat American subjects.

Boker, Taylor, Leland, and Stoddard were never as popular as the earlier generation of American poets (major names like Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant and others). As the second wave of American writers in the 19th century, they often struggled to get respect from critics. That struggle may be what Boker referred to in his poem "Ad Criticum":

...The world grows sage. The harmless tales
That took her in her infant years,
Now stretch her patience till it fails,
And weary her averted ears.

The poem continues by referring to the typical thought of the day that a new American literature must reflect the unique landscape of the country. To Boker, however, "this landscape, bought and sold" make up "the pictured scenes, no more... these are the scenery, not the play." The poem concludes:

O Poet of the present day!
Range back or forth, change time or place,
But mould the sinews of your lay
To struggle in the final race!

Your triumph in the end stands clear;
For when a few short years have run,
The past, the present, there and here,
To future times will be as one.