Poem for a Confederate Cemetary

[formerYank]

Hello Y'all!

I am working on a project that involves reading a poem at the Confederate cemetary at Franklin, Tn.

I've reviewed Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and find it surprisingly overwrought, overdone, and often sexually inappropriate/suggestive/questionable (in light of his subject matter). I've also tried Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body and decided it wasn't quite right for me.

I need a poem that is powerful, not overwrought, but invokes the tragedy, heroism, horror, and waste that was Franklin (and so many other Civil War battles). The poem doesn't have to be a Civil War era poem, either. I think Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" is fantastic but doesn't quite work in a CS Cemetary. "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is aweful and totally inappropriate to read within 10,000 miles of anybody. Suggestions?

[swheeler]

Your project sounds fascinating. I immediately thought about Henry Timrod, who was known as the "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy."

In 1867 he delivered a beautiful poem at the dedication of a Confederate cemetery in South Carolina.

It is known as the "Ode," but its rather clumsy title is "Ode: Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1867."

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!

[ole]

Was going to suggest looking through some of Ambrose Bierce's material, but it looks like sam may have provided what you're looking for.

ole

[matthew mckeon]

Timrod seems a little overwrought to me, but he's true to his time.

Try Carl Sandburg's "Grass"