Plattsburgh--and windless beauty on the bay;
Autumnal morning and the sun at seven:
Southward a wedge of wild ducks in the heaven
Dwindles, and far away
Dim mountains watch the lake, where lurking for their prey
Lie, with their muzzled thunders and pent levin,
The war-ships--Eagle, Preble, Saratoga,
Ticonderoga.
And now a little wind from the northwest
Flutters the trembling blue with snowy flecks.
A gunner, on Macdonough’s silent decks,
Peers from his cannon’s rest,
Staring beyond the low north headland. Crest on crest
Behind green spruce-tops, soft as wild-fowls’ necks,
Glide the bright spars and masts and whitened wales
Of bellying sails.
Rounding, the British lake-birds loom in view,
Ruffling their wings in silvery arrogance:
Chubb, Linnet, Finch, and lordly Confiance
Leading with Downie’s crew
The line. With long booms swung to starboard they heave to,
Whistling their flock of galleys who advance
Behind, then toward the Yankees, four abreast,
Tack landward, west.
Landward the watching townsfolk strew the shore;
Mist-banks of human beings blur the bluffs
And blacken the roofs, like swarms of roosting choughs.
Waiting the cannon’s roar
A nation holds its breath for knell of Nevermore
Or peal of life: this hour shall cast the sloughs
Of generations--and one old dame’s joy:
Her gunner boy.
One moment on the quarter-deck Jock kneels
Beside his Commodore and fighting squad.
Their heads are bowed, their prayers go up toward God--
Toward God, to whom appeals
Still rise in pain and mangling wrath from blind ordeals.
Of man, still boastful of his brother’s blood.--
They stand from prayer. Swift comes and silently
The enemy.
Macdonough holds his men, alert, devout:
“He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea
Driven with the wind. Behold the ships, that be
So great, are turned about
Even with a little helm.” Jock tightens the blue clout
Around his waist, and watches casually
Close-by a game-cock, in a coop, who stirs
And spreads his spurs.
Now, bristling near, the British war-birds swoop
Wings, and the Yankee Eagle screams in fire;
The English Linnet answers, aiming higher,
And _crash_ along Jock’s poop
Her hurtling shot of iron crackles the game-cock’s coop,
Where, lo! the ribald cock, like a town crier
Strutting a gunslide, flaps to the cheering crew--
_Yankee-doodle-doo!_
Boys yell, and yapping laughter fills the roar:
“You bet we’ll do ’em!” “You’re a prophet, cocky!”
“Hooray, old rooster!” “Hip, hip, hip!” cries Jockie.
Calmly the Commodore
Touches his cannon’s fuse and fires a twenty-four.
Smoke belches black. “Huzza! That’s blowed ’em pocky!”
And Downie’s men, like pins before the bowling,
Fall scatter-rolling.
_Boom!_ flash the long guns, echoed by the galleys.
The Confiance, wind-baffled in the bay
With both her port-bow anchors torn away,
Flutters, but proudly rallies
To broadside, while her gunboats range the water-alleys.
Then Downie grips Macdonough in the fray,
And double-shotted from his roaring flail
Hurls the black hail.
The hail turns red, and drips in the hot gloom.
Jock snuffs the reek and spits it from his mouth
And grapples with great winds. The winds blow south,
And scent of lilac bloom
Steals from his mother’s porch in his still sleeping-room.
Lilacs! But now it stinks of blood and drouth!
He staggers up, and stares at blinding light:
“God! This is fight!”
Fight! The sharp loathing retches in his loins;
He gulps the black air, like a drowner swimming,
Where little round suns in a dance go rimming
The dark with golden coins;
Round him and round the splintering masts and jangled quoins
Reel, rattling, and overhead he hears the hymning--
Lonely and loud--of ululating choirs
Strangling with wires.
Fight! But no more the roll of chanting drums,
The fifing flare, the flags, the magic spume
Filling his spirit with a wild perfume;
Now noisome anguish numbs
His sense, that mocks and leers at monstrous vacuums.
_Whang!_ splits the spanker near him, and the boom
Crushes Macdonough, in a jumbled wreck,
Stunned on the deck.
No time to glance where wounded leaders lie,
Or think on fallen sparrows in the storm--
Only to fight! The prone commander’s form
Stirs, rises stumblingly,
And gropes where, under shrieking grape and musketry,
Men’s bodies wamble like a mangled swarm
Of bees. He bends to sight his gun again,
Bleeding, and then--
Oh, out of void and old oblivion
And reptile slime first rose Apollo’s head;
And God in likeness of Himself, ’tis said,
Created such an one,
Now shaping Shakespeare’s forehead, now Napoleon,
Various, by infinite invention bred,
In His own image molding beautiful
The human skull.
Jock lifts his head; Macdonough sights his gun
To fire--but in his face a ball of flesh,
A whizzing clod, has hurled him in a mesh
Of tangled rope and tun,
While still about the deck the lubber clod is spun
And, bouncing from the rail, lies in a plesh
Of oozing blood, upstaring eyeless, red--
A gunner’s head.
* * * * *
Above the ships, enormous from the lake,
Rises a wraith--a phantom dim and gory,
Lifting her wondrous limbs of smoke and glory;
And little children quake
And lordly nations bow their foreheads for her sake,
And bards proclaim her in their fiery story;
And in her phantom breast, heartless unheeding,
Hearts--hearts are bleeding.