A Vision of War

I stood by night upon a reeking plain
Among stark, stiffened hecatombs of slain,
Who blankly stare into the sullen skies
With glassy, sightless, widely-open eyes.
The night was moonless, dense with stormful cloud,
And muffled all, nor aught to sight allowed,
Save in large livid lightning's ghastly glare
Over the dead men with their awful stare.
Upon a rising ground some ruins riven
Of a burnt village, whence the dwellers driven
Fled from a ravening fire with ne'er a home.
Stand in the cold flame desolate and dumb.
Some curl in attitudes of mortal anguish ;
Some with a burning thirst low moaning languish
In their own life-blood, helpless underneath
A heavy horror that hath ceased to breathe.
This form that feels hath hair and beard of grey;
The overlying corse fair curls, but they
Are marred with crimson : this was a fair boy,
Stay of a widowed mother and her joy ;
A tender girl awaits the comely youth,
To whom is plighted a pure maiden troth —
These two, late locked in a death-grapple wild,
Might they not be a father and his child,
Lying together very still and mild ?
While many a fearful, formless, mangled thing.
That once was human, blends with littering
Of tumbril-wheel, of cannon-carriage wrack.
Rifle with sword, and soldier's haversack.

But what arc these portentous Phantoms tall,
That rise before my spirit to appal ?
(Ine rides upon a pale colossal horse
Which, with its head low, sniffs before a corse,
And shakes with terror : but the Rider swart.
Of supernatural height, of regal port.
Inhales the tainted air with nostrils wide,
.\nd face hard .set in a right royal pride.
One strong, red hand a blade that he has bathed
In a warm, living heart, holds reeking;
swathed
With giant folds imperially red
His huge, mailed body ; on his grizzly head
A brazen helm ; he dark surveys the dead ;
Dilate with cruel, unwholesome arrogance
The dictatorial form, the countenance
Swollen with glutted vengeance ; things unsweet
As fumes that bloat yon corses at his feet.
Whence hath the robe drunk purple ? there is hung
A collar of torn hearts that he hath wrung
About his neck, for royal collar slung ;
Chains of wrought gold that blaze with many a gem
In snaky twine contorted over them :
His martial plume, a swath of foodless grain,
Trodden, or scorched, or sodden with late rain.
Tear-blotled letters from far homes are strown
Under his horse-hoofs, or inanimate blown
Of gusty winds, the words upon them traced
Weil nigh, like lives of those who wrote, effaced.
He looks the incarnation of old War,
Resembling an imperial Conqueror,

Low thunder with rare intermission growled,
Wherein were mingled cries of wolves that howled.
I saw one straining, gaunt and fiery-eyed,
Held by the King in leash ; whose awful side
It sprang anon away from, fiercely hounded;
And woe is me ! who witnessed where it bounded.
A little child in sad astonishment
I had beheld, who with a woman went :
She sought distracted on the fearful plain
One special soldier among all the slain :
That famished wolf was hounded on the pair ;
And with fire-fangs it healed a lorn despair !

An Empire floats a banner,
Sable and white and red,
Dyed with ravine and famine and plague
And blood of the innocent dead ;
Black with ravine,
White with famine,
Red with the innocent dead !
Yet a more hideous Phantom than the other
Leaned on the War-shape, like its own twin brother.
A wan blue mist it seemed to emanate
From where the dead most thickly congregate;
A crawling exhalation, yet anon
A lank, tall body with the graveclothes on.
It trailed and sloped o'er many miles of dead,
Until it reached with a most fearful head
The bosom of the Warrior on the horse ;
There leaned, fraternal, like a month-old corse ;
Nay, somewhat otherwise : rather methought
It wore aspect like one most loathsome, fraught
With such disease as by beleaguered Metz
Some saw who passed among the lazarettes.
Surely this was incarnate Pestilence !
Yet, as I shrank with shuddering from hence,
It wore a face pale History shall remember
For his who slew his country one December.
He holds in skeleton semblance of a hand
A distaff broken, for symbol of command.

Not the eagle, but the vulture
Wheels above him, screaming now,
" I will yield my foul sepulture
To the murdered men below ! "
Hoarsely croaks a carrion crow,
" Thou wert as a Pestilence :
Rot abhorred in impotence!"