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

5

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,

5. Apollo. The sun-god. 6. Tun. Large cask.

7

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.

*

Rises a wraith 8.

Above the ships, enormous from the lake,
—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.

Macdonough lies with Downie in one land.
Victor and vanquished long ago were peers.
Held in the grip of peace an hundred years,
England has laid her hand

In ours, and we have held-and still shall hold the band
That makes us brothers of the hemispheres;

Yea, still shall keep the lasting brotherhood
Of law and blood.

Yet one whose terror racked us long of yore
Still wreaks upon the world her lawless might:
Out of the deeps again the phantom Fight

Looms on her wings of war,

Sowing in armèd camps and fields her venomed spore,

Embattling monarch's whim against man's right,
Trampling with iron hoofs the blooms of time

Back in the slime.

7. Plesh. Plash; shallow pool.

8. Wraith. A personification of the spirit of Fight.

We, who from dreams of justice, dearly wrought,
First rose in the eyes of patient Washington,

And through the molten heart of Lincoln won

To liberty forgot,

Now standing lone in peace, 'mid titans strange distraught, Pray much for patience, more-God's will be done!— For vision and for power nobly to see

Ah, you mistake me, comrades, to think that my heart is steel!

Cased in a cold endurance, nor pleasure nor pain to feel; Cold as I am in my manner, yet over these cheeks so seared

Teardrops have fallen in torrents, thrice since my chin grew beard.

Thrice since my chin was bearded I suffered the tears to fall;

Benedict Arnold, the traitor, he was the cause of them all! Once, when he carried Stillwater, proud of his valor, I cried;

Then, with my rage at his treason-with pity when André died.

1. At the battle of Stillwater, better known as the battle of Saratoga, October 7, 1777, the Americans under Gates defeated the British under Burgoyne. Benedict Arnold, who later attempted, with the aid of Major Andrè of the British army, to betray West Point into the hands of the British, played a conspicuous part in the battle. The poem, even in detail, is based upon fact.

Benedict Arnold, the traitor, sank deep in the pit of shame,

Bartered for vengeance his honor, blackened for profit his fame;

Yet never a gallanter soldier, whatever his after crime, Fought on the red field of honor than he in his early time.

Ah, I remember Stillwater, as it were yesterday!

Then first I shouldered a firelock, and set out the foemen to slay.

The country was up all around us, racing and chasing Burgoyne,

And I had gone out with my neighbors, Gates and his forces to join.

Marched we with Poor and with Learned, ready and eager to fight;

There stood the foemen before us, cannon and men on the height;

Onward we trod with no shouting, forbidden to fire till the word;

As silent their long line of scarlet-not one of them whispered or stirred.

Suddenly, then, from among them smoke rose and spread on the breeze;

Grapeshot flew over us sharply, cutting the limbs from

the trees;

But onward we pressed till the order of Cilley fell full on the ear;

Then we leveled our pieces and fired them, and rushed up the slope with a cheer.

Fiercely we charged on their center, and beat back the stout grenadiers,

And wounded the brave Major Ackland, and grappled the swart cannoneers;

Five times we captured their cannons, and five times they took them again;

But the sixth time we had them we kept them, and with them a share of their men.

Our colonel who led us dismounted, high on a cannon he

sprang;

Over the noise of our shouting clearly his joyous words

rang;

"These are our own brazen beauties! Here to America's

cause

I dedicate each, and to freedom!-foes to King George and his laws!"

Worn as we were with the struggle, wounded and bleeding and sore,

Some stood all pale and exhausted; some lay there stiff in their gore;

And round through the mass went a murmur,

to a whispering clear,

that grew

And then to reproaches outspoken-"If General Arnold were here!"

For Gates, in his folly and envy, had given the chief no command,

And far in the rear some had seen him horseless and moodily stand,

Knitting his forehead in anger, gnawing his red lip in pain,

Fretting himself like a bloodhound held back from his prey by a chain.

Hark, at our right there is cheering! there is the ruffle of drums!

Here is the well-known brown charger! Spurring it madly he comes!