On the Slain Collegians by Herman Melville (illustrated by Antonio Frasconi).
Title: On the Slain Collegians.
Author: Herman Melville (illustrated by Antonio Frasconi).
Genre: Poetry, war, American Civil War, death.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1860, 1861, 1862, 1865, and 1866 (this edition and art 1971).
Summary: A collection of 2 poems and 10 excerpts from 9 poems. In Misgivings (1860), the author contemplates the world's evils. In Ball's Bluff (1861), an excerpt, the author describes watching soldiers marching off to war. The Martyr (1865), an excerpt, is written about and in honor of Lincoln's assassination and its dishonor. Shiloh: A Requiem is a poem about The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing. In On the Slain Collegians (186?), an excerpt, the author laments about all the college students and promising young men killed in the war. Billy in the Darbie (18??, posthumously 1924), an excerpt, explained in Billy Bud, is about a hanging. Donelson (1862), an excerpt, narrates the siege of Fort Donelson, focusing on the Union army's victory and the reactions of civilians in the North to the news of the battle. Aurora-Borealis (1866), an excerpt, is poem on the course of the war. Apathy and Enthusiasm (1861), an excerpt, explores the contrasting viewpoints on the Civil War, particularly the apathy of some towards the war's horrors and the enthusiasm of others. The Armies of the Wilderness (1866), an excerpt, reflects on the horrors and consequences of the war, particularly the Battle of the Wilderness. A Grave Near Petersburg, Virginia (1866), an excerpt, is a poem that reflects on the meaninglessness of war and the futility of human ambition through the imagery of a soldier's grave and the cyclical nature of history and death.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ When ocean-clouds over inland hills
Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
And horror the sodden valley fills,
And the spire falls crashing in the town,
I muse upon my country's ills—
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.
♥
~~from Misgivings.
♥ One noonday, at my window in the town,
I saw a sight—saddest that eyes can see—
Young soldiers marching lustily
Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;
While all the porches, walks, and doors
Were rich with ladies cheering royally.
They moved like Juny morning on the wave,
Their hearts were fresh as clover in its prime
(It was the breezy summer time),
Life throbbed so strong,
How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime
Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.
~~from Ball's Bluff.
♥ Good Friday was the day
Of the prodigy and crime,
When they killed him in his pity,
When they killed him in his prime
Of clemency and calm—
When with yearning he was filled
To redeem the evil-willed,
And, though conqueror, be kind;
But they killed him in his kindness,
In their madness and their blindness,
And they killed him from behind.
♥
~~from The Martyr.
♥
~~Shiloh: A Requiem.
♥
♥ The anguish of maternal hearts
Must search for balm divine;
But well the striplings bore their fated parts
(The heavens all parts assign)—
Never felt life's care or cloy.
Each bloomed and died an unabated Boy;
Nor dreamed what death was—thought it mere
Sliding into some vernal sphere.
They knew the joy, but leaped the grief,
Like plants that flower ere comes the leaf—
Which storms lay low in kindly doom,
And kill them in their flush of bloom.
~~from The Slain Collegians.
♥
~~from Billy in the Darbies.
♥
♥
~~from Aurora-Borealis.
♥ O the clammy cold November,
And the winter white and dead,
And the terror dumb with stupor,
And the sky a sheet of lead;
And events that came resounding
With the cry that All was lost,
Like the thunder-cracks of massy ice
In intensity of frost—
Bursting one upon another
Through the horror of the calm.
The paralysis of arm
In the anguish of the heart;
And the hollowness and dearth.
The appealings of the mother
To brother and to brother
Not in hatred so to part—
And the fissure in the hearth
Growing momently more wide.
♥
~~from Apathy and Enthusiasm.
♥
♥ May his grave be green—still green
While happy years shall run;
May none come nigh to disinter
The—Buried Gun.
~~from A Grave Near Peteresburg, Virginia.
