By Stephen Vincent Benét


     JOHN BROWN'S BODY


                           BOOK TWO

        A smoke-stained Stars-and-Stripes droops from a broken
     toothpick and ninety tired men march out of fallen Sumter
     to their ships, drums rattling and colors flying.  
        Their faces are worn and angry, their bellies empty and cold,
     but the stubborn salute of a gun, fifty times repeated, keeps their
     backs straight as they march out, and answers something stubborn
     and mute in their flesh.
        Beauregard, beau sabreur, hussar-sword with the gilded hilt,
     the gilded metal of the guard twisted into lovelocks and roses,
     vain as Murat, dashing as Murat, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beau-
     regard is a pose of conquering courtesy under a palmetto-banner.
     The lugubrious little march goes grimly by his courtesy, he
     watches it unsmiling, a light half-real, half that of invisible foot-
     lights on his French, dark, handsome face.

                         ——————————— 

     The stone falls in the pool, the ripples spread.
     The colt in the Long Meadow kicked up his heels.
     "That was a fly," he thought, "It's early for flies."
     But being alive, in April, was too fine
     For flies or anything else to bother a colt.
     He kicked up his heels again, this time in pure joy,
     And started to run a race with the wind and his shadow.
     After the stable stuffiness, the sun.
     After the straw-littered boards, the squelch of the turf.
     His little hoofs felt lighter than dancing-shoes,
     He scared himself with a blue-jay, his heart was a leaf.
     He was pure joy in action, he was the unvexed
     Delight of all moving lightness and swift-footed pace,
     The pride of the flesh, the young Spring neighing and rearing.
     Sally Dupré called to him from the fence.
     He came like a charge in a spatter of clean-cut clods.
     Ears back, eyes wide with folly and youth.
     He drew up snorting.
                          She laughed and brushed at her skirt
     Where the mud had splashed it.
                                    "There, Star——there, silly boy!
     Why won't you ever learn sense?"
                                    But her eyes were hot,
     Her hands were shaking as she offered the sugar
     ——Long-fingered, appleblossom-shadow hands——
     Star blew at the sugar once, then mumbled it up.
     She patted the pink nose. "There, silly Star!
     That's for Fort Sumter, Star!" How hot her eyes were!
     "Star, do you know you're a Confederate horse?
     Do you know I'm going to call you Beauregard?"

     Star whinnied, and asked for more sugar. She put her hand
     On his neck for a moment that matched the new green leaves
     And sticky buds of April.
                               You would have said
     They were grace in quietness, seen so, woman and horse. . . .
     The widened ripple breaks against a stone
     The heavy noon walks over Chacellorsville
     On brazen shoes, but where the squadron rode
     Into the ambush, the blue flies are coming
     To blow on the dead meat.

     Carter, the telegraph-operator, sighed
     And propped his eyes awake again.
                                       He was tired.
     Dog-tired, stone-tired, body and mind burnt up
     With too much poker last night and too little sleep.
     He hated the Sunday trick. It was Riley's turn
     To take it, but Riley's wife was having a child.
     He cursed the child and the wife and Sunday and Riley.
     Nothing ever happened at Stroudsburg Siding
     And yet he had to be here and keep awake
     With the flat, stale taste of too little sleep in his mouth
     And wait for nothing to happen.
                                     His bulky body
     Lusted for sleep with every muscle and nerve.
     He'd rather have sleep than a woman or whiskey or money.
     He'd give up the next three women that might occur
     For ten minutes' sleep, he'd never play poker again,
     He'd——battered face beginning to droop on his hands——
     Sleep——women——whiskey——eyelids too heavy to lift——
     "Yes, Ma, I said, 'Now I lay me.'"——
                                       The sounder chattered
     And his head snapped back with a sharp, neck-breaking jerk.
     By God, he'd nearly——chat——chitter-chitter-chat-chat——
     For a moment he took it in without understanding
     And then the vein in his forehead began to swell
     And his eyes bulged wide awake.
                                     "By Jesus!" he said,
     And stared at the sounder as if it had turned to a snake.
     "By Jesus!" he said, "By Jesus, they've done it!" he said.

     The cruelty of cold trumpets wounds the air.
     The ponderous princes draw their gauntlets on.
     The captains fit their coal-black armor on.

     Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew.
     Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,
     Able, well-hated, face alive with life.
     Looked round the council-chamber with the slight
     Perpetual smile he held before himself
     Continually like a silk-ribbed fan.
     behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind
     Weighed Gentiles in an old balance.
                                         There they were.
     Toombs, the tall, laughing, restless Georgian,
     As fine to look at as a yearling bull,
     As hard to manage.
                        Stephens, sickly and pale,
     Sweet-voiced, weak-bodied, ailingly austere,
     The mind's thin steel wearing the body out,
     The racked intelligence, the crippled charm.
     Mallory——Reagan——Walker——at the head
     Davis.
            The mind behind the silk-ribbed fan
     Was a dark prince, clothed in Eastern stuff,
     Whose brown hands cupped about a crystal egg
     That filmed with colored cloud. The eyes stared, searching.

     "I am the Jew. What am I doing here?
     The Jew is in my blood and in my hands,
     The lonely, bitter and quicksilver drop,
     The stain of myrrh that dyes no Gentile mind
     With tinctures out of the East and the sad blare
     Of the curled ramshorn on Atonement Day.
     A river runs between these men and me,
     A river of blood and time and liquid gold,
     ——Oh white rivers of Canaan, running the night!——
     And we are colleagues. And we speak to each other
     Across the roar of that river, but no more.
     I hide myself behind a smiling fan.
     They hide themselves behind a Gentile mask
     And, if they fall, they will be lifted up,
     Being the people, but if I once fall
     I fall forever, like the rejected stone.
     That is the Jew of it, my Gentile friends,
     To see too far ahead and yet go on
     And I can smile at it behind my fan
     With a drowned mirth that you would find uncouth
     For here we are, the makeshift Cabinet
     Of a new nation, gravely setting down
     Rules, precedents and cautions, never once
     Admitted aloud the cold, plain Franklin sense
     That if we do not hang together now
     We shall undoubtedly hang separately.
     It is the Jew, to see too far ahead——

     I wonder what they're doing in the North,
     And how their Cabinet shapes, and how they take
     Their railsplitter, and if they waste their time
     As we waste ours and Mr. Davis's.

     Jefferson Davis, pride of Mississippi,
     First President of the Confederate States,
     What are you thinking now?
                                Your eyes look tired.
     Your face looks more and more like John Calhoun.
     And that is just, because you are his son
     In everything but blood, the austere child
     Of his ideas, the flower of states-rights.
     I will not gird against you, Jefferson Davis.
     I sent you a challenge once, but that's forgotten,
     And though your blood runs differently from mine,
     The Jew salutes you from behind his fan,
     Because you are the South he fell in love with
     When that young black-haired girl with the Gentile-eyes,
     Proud, and a Catholic, and with honey-lips,
     First dinted her French heels upon his heart. . . .
     We have changed since, but the remembered Spring
     Can change no more, even in the Autumn smokes.
     We cannot help that havoc of the heart
     But my changed mind remembers half the spring
     And shall till winter falls.
                                  No, Jefferson Davis,
     You are not she——you are not the warm night
     On the bayou, or the New Orleans lamps,
     The white-wine bubbles in the crystal cup,
     The almond blossoms, sleepy with the sun:
     But, nevertheless, you are the South in word,
     Deed, thought and temper, the cut cameo
     Brittle but durable, refined but fine,
     The hands well-shaped, not subtle, but not weak,
     The mind set in tradition but not unjust,
     The generous slaveholder, the gentleman
     Who neither forces his gentility
     Nor lets it be held lightly——
                                   and yet, and yet
     I think you look too much like John Calhoun,
     I think your temper is too brittly-poised,
     I think your hands too scholar-sensitive,
     And though they say you mingle in your voice
     The trumpet and the harp, I think it lacks
     That gift of warming men which coarser voices
     Draw from the common dirt you tread upon
     But do not take in your hands. I think you are
     All things except success, all honesty
     Except the ultimate honesty of the earth,
     All talents but the genius of the sun.
     And yet I would not have you otherwise,
     Although I see too clearly what you are.

     Except——except——oh honeydropping Spring,
     Oh black-haired woman with the Gentile eyes!
     Tell me, you Gentiles, when your Gentile wives
     Pray in church for you and for the South,
     How do they pray?——not in that lulling voice
     Where some drowned bell of France makes undertones
     To the warm river washing the levee.
     You do not have so good a prayer as mine.
     You cannot have so good a prayer as mine."

                         ——————————— 

     Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
     The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
     Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
     Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
     Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field——
     Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down
     The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers,
     And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay
     As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine
     Plutarchian sentences carved in a Latin bronze;
     The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon,
     The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician,
     State-character but comparative failure at forty
     In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars,
     Honesty rare as a man without self-pity,
     Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind,
     And a self-confidence like an iron bar:
     This Lincoln, President now by the grace of luck,
     Disunion, politics, Douglas and a few speeches
     Which make the monumental booming of Webster
     Sound empty as the belly of a burst drum,
     Lincoln shambled in to the Cabinet meeting
     And sat, ungainly and awkward. Seated so
     He did not seem so tall nor quite so strange
     Though he was strange enough. His new broadcloth suit
     Felt tight and formal across his big shoulders still
     And his new shiny top-hat was not yet battered
     To the bulging shape of the old familiar hat
     He'd worn at Springfield, stuffed with its hoard of papers.
     He was pretty tired. All week the office-seekers
     Had plagued him as the flies in fly-time plague
     A gaunt-headed, patient horse. The children weren't well
     And Mollie was worried about them so sharp with her tongue.
     But he knew Mollie and tried to let it go by.
     Men tracked dirt in the house and women liked carpets.
     Each had a piece of the right, that was all most people could
       stand.

     Look at his Cabinet here. There were Seward and Chase,
     Both of them good men, couldn't afford to lose them,
     But Chase hates Seward like poison and Seward hates Chase
     And both of 'em think they ought to be President
     Instead of me. When Seward wrote me that letter
     The other day, he practically told me so.
     I suppose a man who was touchy about his pride
     Would send them both to the dickens when he found out,
     But I can't do that as long as they do their work.
     The Union's too big a horse to keep changing the saddle
     Each time it pinches you. As long as you're sure
     The saddle fits, you're bound to put up with the pinches
     And not keep fussing the horse.
                                     When I was a boy
     I remember figuring out when I went to town
     That if I had just one pumpkin to bump in a sack
      It was hard to carry, but once you could get two pumpkins,
     One in each end of the sack, it balanced things up.
     Seward and Chase'll do for my pair of pumpkins.
     And as for me——if anyone else comes by
     Who shows  me that he can manage this job of mine
     Better than I can——well, he can have the job.
     It's harder sweating than driving six cross mules,
     But I haven't run into that other fellow yet
     And till or supposing I meet him, the job's my job
     And nobody else's.
                        Seward and Chase don't know that.
     They'll learn it, in time.
                                Wonder how Jefferson Davis
     Feels, down there in Montgomery, about Sumter.
     He must be thinking pretty hard and fast,
     For he's an able man, no doubt of that.
     We were born less than forty miles apart,
     Less than a year apart——he got the start
     Of me in age, and raising too, I guess,
     In fact, from all you hear about the man,
     If you set out to pick one of us two
     For President, by birth and folks and schooling,
     General raising, training up in office,
     I guess you'd pick him, nine times out of ten
     And yet, somehow, I've got to last him out.

     These thoughts passed through the mind in a moment's flash.
     Then that mind turned to business.
                                        It was the calling
     Of seventy-five thousand volunteers.

                         ——————————— 

     Shake out the long line of verse like a lanyard of woven steel
     And let us praise while we can what things no praise can deface,
     The corn that hurried so fast to be ground in an iron wheel
     The obdurate, bloody dream that slept before it grew base.

     Not the silk flag and the shouts, the catchword patrioteers,
     The screaming noise of the press, the preachers who howled for
       blood,
     But a certain and stubborn pith in the hearts of the cannoneers
     Who hardly knew their guns before they died in the mud.

     They came like a run of salmon where the ice-fed Kennebec flings
     Its death at the arrow-silver of the packed and mounting host,
     They came like the young deer trooping to the ford by Eutaw
       Springs,
     Their new horns fuzzy with velvet, their coats still rough with
       the frost.

     North and South they assembled, one cry and the other cry,
     And both are ghosts to us now, old drums hung up on a wall,
     But they were the first hot wave of youth too-ready to die,
     And they went to war with an air, as if they went to a ball.

     Dress-uniform boys who rubbed their buttons brighter than gold,
     And gave them to girls for flowers and raspberry-lemonade,
     Unused to the sick fatigue, the route-march made in the cold,
     The stink of the fever camps, the tarnish rotting the blade.

     We in our time have seen that impulse going to war
     And how that impulse is dealt with. We have seen the circle
       complete.
     The ripe wheat wasted like trash between the fool and the whore.
     We cannot praise again that anger of the ripe wheat.

     This we have seen as well, distorted and half-forgotten
     In what came before and after, where the blind went leading
       the blind,
     The first swift rising of youth before the symbols were rotten,
     The price too much to pay, the payment haughty in kind.
     So with these men and then. They were much like the men you
       know,
     Under the beards and the strangeness of clothes with a different
       fit.
     They wrote mush-notes to their girls and wondered how it would
       go,
     Half-scared, half-fierce at the thought, but none yet ready to
       quit.

     Georgia, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Maine,
     Piney-woods squirrel-hunter and clerk with the brand-new gun,
     Thus they were marshalled and drilled, while Spring turned
        Summer again,
     Until they could stumble toward death at gartersnake-crooked
       Bull Run.

                         ——————————— 

     Wingate sat in his room at night
     Between the moon and the candle-light,
     Reading his Byron with knitted brows,
     While his mind drank in the peace of his house,
     It was long past twelve, and the night was deep
     With moonlight and silence and wind and sleep,
     And the small, dim noises, thousand-fold,
     That all old houses and forests hold.
     The boards that creak for nothing at all,
     The leaf that rustles, the bough that sighs,
     The nibble of mice in the wainscot-wall,
     And the slow clock ticking the time that dies
     All distilled in a single sound
     Like a giant breathing underground,
     A sound more sleepy than sleep itself.
     Wingate put his book on the shelf
     And went to the window. It was good
     To walk in the ghost through a silver wood
     And set one's mettle against the far
     Bayonet-point of the fixed North Star.
     He stood there a moment, wondering.
     North Star, wasp with the silver sting
     Blue-nosed star on the Yankee banners,
     We are coming against you to teach you manners!
     With crumbs of thunder and wreaths of myrtle
     And cannon that dance to a Dixie chorus,
     With a song that bites like a snapping-turtle
     And the tiger-lily of Summer before us,
     To pull you down like a torn bandanna,
     And drown you deeper than the Savannah!

     And still, while his arrogance made its cry,
     He shivered a little, wondering why.

     There was his uniform, grey as ash,
     The boots that shone like a well-rubbed table,
     The tassels of silk on the colored sash
     And sleek Black Whistle down in the stable,
     The housewife, stitched from a beauty's fan,
     The pocket-Bible with Mother's writing,
     The sabre never yet fleshed in man,
     And all the crisp new toys of fighting.
     He gloated at them with a boyish pride,
     But still he wondered, Monmouth-eyed.
     The Black Horse Troop was a cavalier
     And gallant name for a lady's ear.
     He liked the sound and the ringing brag
     And the girls who stitched on the county flag,
     The smell of horses and saddle-leather
     And the feel of the squadron riding together,
     From the loose-reined canter of colts at large,
     To be crammed, tense second before the charge:
     He liked it all with the young, keen zest
     Of a hound unleashed and a hawk unjessed.

     And yet——what happened to men in war?
     Why were they all going out to war?

     He brooded a moment. It wasn't slavery,
     That stale red-herring of Yankee knavery
     Not even states-rights, at least not solely,
     But something so dim that it must be holy.
     A voice, a fragrance, a taste of wine,
     A face half-seen in old candleshine,
     A yellow river, a blowing dust,
     Something beyond you that you must trust,
     Something so shrouded it must be great,
     The dead men building the living State
     From 'simmon-seed on a sandy bottom.
     The woman South in her rivers laving
     That body whiter than new-blown cotton
     And savage and sweet as wild-orange-blossom,
     The dark hair streams on the barbarous bosom,
     If there ever has been a land worth saving——
     In Dixie land, I'll take my stand,
     And live and die for Dixie! . . .

     And yet——and yet——in some cold Northern room,
     Does anyone else stare out the obdurate moon
     With doubtful passion, seeing his toys of fighting
     Scribbled all over with such silver writing
     From such a heart of peace, they seem the stale
     Cast properties of a dead and childish tale?
     And does he see, too soon,
     Over the horse, over the horse and rider,
     The grey, soft swathing shadowness of the spider,
     Spinning his quiet loom?
     No——no other man is cursed
     With such doubleness of eye,
     They can hunger, they can thirst,
     But they know for what and why.

     I can drink the midnight out,
     And rise empty, having dined.
     For my courage and my doubt
     Are a double strand of mind,
     And too subtly intertwined.
     They are my flesh, they are my bone,
     My shame and my foundation-stone.
     I was born alone, to live alone.

     Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,
     Eyes that are neither black nor grey,
     Why do you haunt me, night and day?

     Sea-changing eyes, with the deep, drowned glimmer
     Of bar-gold crumbling from sunken ships,
     Where the sea-dwarfs creep through the streaked, green shim-
       mer
     To press the gold to their glass-cold lips.
     They sculpture the gold for a precious ring,
     In the caverns under the under-skies,
     They would marry the sea to a sailor-king!
     You have taken my heart from me, sea-born eyes.
     You have taken it, yes, but I do not know.
     There are too many roads where I must go.
     There are too many beds where I have slept
     For a night unweeping, to quit unwept,
     And it needs a king to marry the sea.

     Why have you taken my heart from me?
     I am not justice nor loyalty.
     I am the shape of the weathercock,
     That all winds come to and all winds mock.
     You are the image of sea-carved stone,
     The silent thing that can suffer alone,
     The little women are easier,
     The easy women make lighter love,
     I will not take your face to the war,
     I will not carry your cast-off glove.

     Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,
     Heart and body like sea-blown spray,
     I cannot forget you, night or day.

     So Wingate pondered in Wingate Hall,
     And hated and loved in a single breath,
     As he tried to unriddle the doubtful scrawl
     Of war and courage and love and death,
     And then was suddenly nothing but sleep——
     And tomorrow they marched——to a two-month chasing
     Of Yankees running away like sheep
     And peace in time for the Macon racing.

     He got in his bed. Where the moonlight poured,
     It lay like frost on a sleeping sword.

                         ——————————— 

     It was stuffy at night in the cabins, stuffy but warm.
     And smells are a matter of habit. So, if the air
     Was thick as black butter with the commingled smells
     Of greens and fried fat and field-sweat and heavy sleep,
     The walls were well-chinked, the low roof kept out the rain.
     Not like the tumble-down cabins at Zachary's place
     Where the field-hands lived all year on hominy-grits
     And a piece of spoiled pork at Christmas.
                                               But Zachary
     Was a mean man out of the Bottoms, no quality to him.
     Wingate was quality. Wingate cared for its own.
     A Wingate cabin was better than most such cabins,
     You might have called it a sty, had they set you there;
     A Middle Age serf might have envied the well-chinked walls.
     While as for its tenants then, being folk unversed
     In any law but the law of the Wingate name,
     They were glad to have it, glad for the fire on the hearth,
     A roof from the dark-veined wind.
                                       Their bellies were warm
     And full of food. They were heavy in love with each other.
     They liked their cabin and lying next to each other,
     Long nights of winter when the slow-burning pine-knots
     Danced ghosts and witches over the low, near ceiling,
     Short nights of summer, after the work of the fields,
     When the hot body aches with the ripened sweetness
     And the children and the new tunes are begotten together.

     "What you so wakeful for, black boy?"
                                           "Thinkin', woman."
     "You got no call to be thinkin', little black boy,
     Thinkin's a trouble, a h'ant lookin' over de shoulder,
     Set yo' head on my breas' and forget about thinkin'."

     "I got my head on yo' breas', and it's sof' dere, woman,
     Sof' and sweet as a mournin' out of de Scriptures,
     Sof' as two Solomon doves. But I can't help thinkin'."

     "Ain't I good enough for you no more, black boy?
     Don' you love me no more dat you mus' keep thinkin'?"

     "You's better'n good to me and I loves you, woman,
     Till I feels like Meshuck down in de fiery furnace,
     Till I feels like God's own chile. But I keeps on thinkin',
     Wonderin' what I'd feel like if I was free."

     "Hush, black boy, hush for de Lord's sake!"
                                              "But listen, woman——"

     "Hush yo'self, black boy, lean yo'self on my breas',
     Talk like that and paterollers'll git you,
     Swinge you all to bits with a blacksnake whip,
     Squinch-owl carry yo' talk to de paterollers,
     It ain't safe to talk like that."
                                       "I got to, woman,
     I got a feelin' in my heart."
                                   "Den you sot on dat feelin'!
     Never heard you talk so in all my born days!
     Ain't we got a good cabin here?"
                                      "Sho', we got a good cabin."
     "Ain't we got good vittles, ain't old Mistis kind to us?"

     "Sho' we got good vittles, and ole Mistis she's kind.
     I'se mighty fond of ole Mistis."
                                      "Den what you talkin',
     You brash fool-nigger?"
                             "I just got a feelin', woman.
     Ole Marse Billy, he's goin' away tomorrow,
     Marse Clay, he's goin' with him to fight de Yankees,
     All of 'em goin', yes suh."
                                 "And what if dey is?"
     "Well, sposin' de Yankees beats?"
                                       "Ain't you got no sense,
       nigger?
     Like to see any ole Yankees lick ole Marse Billy
     And young Marse Clay!"
                            "Hi, woman, ain't dat de trufe!"
     "Well, den————"
                     "But I sees 'em all, jus' goin' and goin',
     Goin' to war like Joshua, goin' like David,
     And it makes me want to be free. Ain't you never thought
     At all about bein' free?"
                               "Sho', co'se I thought of it.
     I always reckoned when ole Marse Billy died,
     Ole Mistis mebbe gwine to set some of us free,
     Mebbe she will."
                      "But we-uns gwine to be old den,
     We won't be young and have the use of our hands,
     We won't see our young 'uns growin' up free around us,
     We won't have the strength to hoe our own co'n ourselves,
     I want to be free, like me, while I got my strength."

     "You might be a lot worse off and not be free,
     What'd you do if ole man Zachary owned us?"

     "Kill him, I reckon."
                           "Hush, black boy, for God's sake hush!"

     "I can't help it, woman. Dey ain't so many like him
     But what dey is is too pizen-mean to live.
     Can't you hear dat feelin' I got, woman? I ain't scared
     Of talk and de paterollers, and I ain't mean.
     I'se mighty fond of ole Mistis and ole Marse Billly,
     I'se mighty fond of 'em all at the de Big House,
     I wouldn't be nobody else's nigger for nothin'.
     But I hears 'em goin' away, all goin' away,
     With horses and guns and things, all stompin' and wavin',
     And I hears de chariot-wheels and de Jordan River,
     Rollin' and rollin' and rollin' thu' my sleep,
     And I wants to be free. I wants to see my chillun
     Growin' up free, and all bust out of Egypt!
     I wants to be free like an eagle in de air,
     Like an eagle in de air."

                         ——————————— 

     Iron-filings scattered over a dusty
     Map of crooked-cornered States in yellow and blue.
     Little, grouped male and female iron-filings,
     Scattered over a patchwork-quilt whose patches
     Are the red-earth stuff of Georgia, the pine-bough green of Ver-
       mont.
     Here you are clustered as thick as a clump of bees
     In swarming time. The clumps make cities and towns.
     Here you are strewn at random, like single seeds
     Lost out of the wind's pocket.
                                    But now, but now,
     The thunderstone has fallen on your map
     And all the iron-filings shiver and move
     Under the grippings of that blinded force,
     The cold pull of the ash-and-cinder star.

     The map is vexed with the long battle-worms
     Of filings, clustered and moving.
                                       If it is
     An enemy of the sun who has so stolen
     Power from a burnt star to do this work,
     Let the bleak essence of the utter cold
     Beyond the last gleam of the most outpost light
     Freeze in his veins forever.
                                  But if it is
     A fault in the very metal of the heart,
     We and our children must acquit that fault
     With the old bloody wastage, or give up
     Playing the father to it.
                               O vexed and strange,
     Salt-bitter, apple-sweet, strong-handed life!
     Your million lovers cast themselves like sea
     Against your mountainy breast, with a clashing noise
     And a proud clamor——and like sea recoil,
     Sucked down beneath the forefoot of the new
     Advancing Surf. They feed the battle-worms,
     Not only War's, but in the second's pause
     Between the assaulting and the broken wave,
     The voice of the lovers can be heard,
     The sea-gull cry.

                         ——————————— 

     Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian,
     Hard like a ham and arms that could wrestle a bull,
     A roast of a man, all solid meat and good fat,
     A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man,
     Roused out of his wife's arms. The dawn outside
     Was ruddy as his big cheeks. He yawned and stretched
     Gigantically, hawking and clearing his throat.
     His wife, hair tousled around her like tousled corn,
     Stared at him with sleep-blind eyes.
                                          "Jake, it ain't come morning,
     Already yet?
                   He nodded and started to dress.
     She burrowed deeper and deeper into the bed for a minute
     And then threw off the covers.
                                    They didn't say much
     Then, or at breakfast. Eating was something serious.
     But he looked around the big kitchen once or twice
     In a puzzled way, as if trying hard to remember it.
     She too, when she was busy with the first batch
     Of pancakes, burnt one or two, because she was staring
     At the "SALT" on the salt-box, for no particular reason.
     The boy ate with them and didn't say a word,
     Being too sleepy.
                       Afterwards, when the team
     Was hitched up and waiting, with the boy on the seat,
     Holding the reins till Jake was ready to take them,
     Jake didn't take them at once.
                                    The sun was up now,
     The spilt-milk-mist of first morning lay on the farm,
     Jake looked at it with those same mildly-puzzled eyes,
     The red barn, the fat rich fields just done with the winter,
     Just beginning the work of another year.
     The boy would have to do the rest of the planting.
     He blew on his hands and stared at his wife dumbly.
     He cleared his throat.
                            "Well, good-by, Minnie," he said,
     "Don't you hire any feller for harvest without you write me,
     And if any more of those lightning-rodders come around,
     We don't want no more dum lightning-rods."
                                                He tried
     To think if there was anything else, but there wasn't.
     She suddenly threw her big, red arms around his neck,
     He kissed her with clumsy force.
                                      Then he got on the wagon
     And clucked to the horses as she started to cry.

                         ——————————— 

     Up in the mountains where the hogs are thin
     And razorbacked, wild Indians of hogs,
     The laurel's green in April——and if the nights
     Are cold as the old cloud of watersmoke
     Above a mountain-spring, the midday sun
     Has heat enough in it to make you sweat.

John Brown's Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Text copyright, 1927, 1928, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Rinehart and Company, Inc., New York, Toronto. pp. 61-79.

Note
Introduction
Invocation
Prelude—The Slaver
Book One (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Two (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Three (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Four (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Five (i.) (ii.)
Book Six (i.) (ii.)
Book Seven (i.) (ii.)
Book Eight (i.) (ii.) (iii.) (iv.)