Looking into History

I. Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye Stand in a land subdued beyond belief. Belief might lend them life again. I try Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief To see my spellbound fathers in these men Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere, Show but the postures men affected then And the hermit faces of a finished year. The guns and gear and all are strange until Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees Verging a road that struggles up a hill. They’re sycamores. The long-abated breeze Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound Of guns and a great forest in distress. Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness. II. But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees Rode on the back of Simois to sink In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls Its salvage of the world in shifty waves, Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls And yielding views of its confounded graves To the new moon, the sun, or any eye That in its shallow shoreward version sees The pebbles charging with a deathless cry And carageen memorials of trees. III. Now, old man of the sea, I start to understand: The will will find no stillness Back in a stilled land. The dead give no command And shall not find their voice Till they be mustered by Some present fatal choice. Let me now rejoice In all impostures, take The shape of lion or leopard, Boar, or watery snake, Or like the comber break, Yet in the end stand fast And by some fervent fraud Father the waiting past, Resembling at the last The self-established tree That draws all waters toward Its live formality.