Poetry is America's oldest continuously published poetry magazine (113 years). Currently they also
publish online their "Poem of the Day" chosen from living authors and dead, from our U.S.A. or
abroad, in English or translated. Most mornings I read at least part of the poem they offer.
On Memorial Day 2024 Poetry published Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as
their poem of the day. I've loved the song since primary school. We'd innocently belt it out in Friday
morning assembly as though we'd won the good war, as our fathers had just done. 'Twas 1946-50ish
Glory, hallelujah!
Nonetheless I am somewhat surprised that Poetry chose our Union's battle hymn for Memorial Day
2024. Howe's lyrics exactly suit the start of a great war. She wrote them in 1861 when no one could
imagine just how great her war would be. The story goes that Howe and a clergyman were sitting in a
carriage on a road in Virginia, near Washington, jammed into a jubilant crowd of spectators and
marching soldiers. The soldiers were singing "John Brown's Body Lies A-mouldr'ing in the Grave,"
their favorite march, and the crowd and Howe joined in: "We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree
. . .".
Reverend James Freeman Clarke, himself an ardent abolitionist, challenged Howe to write a more
uplifting set of lyrics for the marching troops to sing. She offered them the uplift of the Book of
Revelations:
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel
As you deal with my contemners so with you my grace shall deal
Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel . . .
The revivalist stomp and shout music had been around since 1805 or later, but Howe had significantly
uplifted 1861's folksy lyric tonality. The men whose heels were to do the dirty work of war were
singing different lyrics to the same march:
He captured Harper's Ferry, with his nineteen men so few
And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled thru and thru
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew . . .
The contrast between Howe's ecstatic Last Days heroizing diction and the Massachusetts Tigers'
work-a-day diction gives us civilians a choice between music for a "Great War"-- with banners flying
and maidens throwing flowers -- and music for a necessary war, however rare such a war may be.
Great wars are ghastly and generate high-powered rhetorical support and martial pageantry.
Necessary wars lower the volume of cheers from the sidelines. Howe's contemporary Herman
Melville dials the volume down in "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight," the first deployment of a
fully iron, steam-powered ship:
Hail to victory without the gaud
Of glory; zeal that needs no fans
Of banners . . .
By 1865 620,000 to 850,000 men (pick your statistician) could not come marching home. There's
lamentation woven into the fabric of Memorial Day.
So, for my Memorial Day poetry I chose "Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground". By 1863, both
sides were singing it:
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight
Wishing for the war to cease
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace.
Melville gets the last, measured word :
War shall yet be, and to the end;
But war-paint shows the streaks of weather;
War yet shall be, but the warriors
Are now but operatives; War's made
Less grand than Peace,
And a singe runs through lace and feather
Perhaps saints Matthew and Luke had the first words:
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things
must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
And in between the first and Last words, Randall Jarrell:
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
. . . and the end is not yet
******
Note: it's difficult to find the lyrics to "John Brown's Body" online. I wonder why that is.
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