TO THE GARRISON AT WAKE

A little while, O sacramental dead, Unvisited a little while yet be. You shall not lie forgotten nor alone While ships there are, and planes, and guns, and men. For now, more adamant, more fierce, more keen, In permanence and purpose fixed as stars, To finite manhood hereby we annex The infinite almightiness of God, And we shall be His judgment! Woe to that Ambitious offal sprung from Hell’s abyss Which catastrophically we shall destroy, Annihilate, forever make extinct. No evil feet, where from your chaliced hearts The precious blood has spilled, shall tread that earth, That holy, transubstantiated isle Whose very soil is body, soul, and blood Of restless lads who loved America! On who so tread shall light and darkness pounce, Vast winged horrors plummeting, destroy, Consuming brilliance, glut-engulfing night, Like twin devourers, feed there on them! Ye ancient dead, who fell with Greece or Rome, Or in the name of Allah and his prophet, Who fell through all the cycled years of war, Through plague, disaster, fell in civil strife, Through revolution, famine, flood and fire, Apocalyptic woe or freezing night, Ye ancient dead, to whom heroic stance And unsurrendered dignity still cling, Receive who come among you now like gods, Four hundred splendid, handsome, golden lads. To them extend that comradship of men Who live the rugged military life, Who smile that full, good-natured kind of smile, Most boyishly unstudied, most beloved, Who know each other’s thoughts and wants and hopes, Who know what prayers are said and what forgot, Who know that greatest, crucifying love Where friends for friends on strange new crosses die! And you, O Seraph Outpost Garrison, Who side by side heroically made stand, No quarter given, none received, none asked, Who fought those vicious legions in the three Old elemental spheres, and of the fourth, Almost invincible to flame and death, Stood firmly placed before, beneath the attack Like Milton’s epic host against all Hell, New rest, brave lads, in consecrated sleep, While lonely trumpets sing through muffled drums A requiem and threnody of grief. Ah, great Cecilia, Bach, and Handel blind, Those last full-throated notes to swell from earth, That trumpet song of loneliness and night, Give it a contrapuntal theme beneath, Whose pedal harmonies orchestrally Shall hint of resurrection, while the pipes And organ-pillar’d flutes resound the mode To which the ancient dead have matched and sung. Then light the strings until they burn as bright And numberless as candles round a shrine, Then start the rolling drums, and set the brass Cannonically recalling one another, And let the reeds’ ancestral wisdom speak, What though at first the grave bassoons must weep Their melancholy, febrile lamentation. Unsheathe the horns and cut the harmonic knot. Let full grand orchestra astound the void With soaring fugue and metric tympani. And in this last, let herald trumpets sing While bright kid-trumpeteers who fell at Pearl Resound a call to quarters there beyond!