Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
The Captain’s Drum
By Benjamin Franklin Taylor (1819–1887)I
The winter lay like sheep about
The ragged pastures mullein gray;
The April sun shone in and out,
The showers swept by in fitful flocks,
And eaves ticked fast like mantel clocks;
Would wear a ribbon broad and bright,
And now and then a wingéd crowd
Of shivering azure flash in sight.
So rainbows bend, and bluebirds fly,
And violets show their bits of sky.
In quilted hood and bombazine,
In beaver hat with flaring crown,
And quaint Vandyke and victorine;
And buttoned boys in roundabout
From calyx collars blossom out;
And foot-stoves tinkle up the aisle;
A gray-haired elder leads the choir,
And girls in linsey-woolsey smile.
So back to life the beings glide
Whose very graves had ebbed and died.
We call the roll, and not in vain,
For one whose flintlock musket set
The echoes wild round Fort Duquesne,
And smelled the battle’s powder smoke
Ere Revolution’s thunders woke.
Within the dull long-metre place.
That day, upon the parson’s ear,
And trampling down his words of grace,
A horseman’s gallop rudely beat
Along the splashed and empty street.
And then a letter, wasp-nest gray,
That ran: “The Concord minute-men
And red-coats had a fight to-day!
To Captain Abbe this with speed.”
Twelve little words to tell the deed.
The old quickstep of battle born,
Slung on once more a battered drum
That bore a painted unicorn,
Then right-about, as whirls a torch,
He stood before the sacred porch.
Broke in upon the house of prayer;
And then a wind-song swept the trees,
And then a snarl from wolfish lair;
And then a charge of grenadiers,
And then a flight of drum-beat cheers.
The casements rattled strange accord;
No mortal knew what either meant;
’T was double-drag and Holy Word,
Thus saith the drum, and thus the Lord.
The captain raised so wild a rout
He drummed the congregation out.
The soldier bared his head and spoke,
And every sentence burned and blazed,
As trenchant as a sabre stroke:
“’T is time to pick the flint to-day,
To sling the knapsack, and away!
With British red-coats, brothers’ blood!
In rightful cause the earliest dead
Are always best beloved of God.
Mark time! Now let the march begin!
All bound for Boston fall right in!”
The throbbing roll of battle beat;
“Fall in, my men!” and one by one
They rhymed the tune with heart and feet.
And so they made a Sabbath march
To glory ’neath the elm-tree arch.
Along the churchyard’s breathless sod,
And holier grew the hallowed ground
Where Virtue slept and Valor trod.
Two hundred strong that April day
They rallied out and marched away.
Their names are writ on Glory’s page.
The brave old captain’s Sunday drill
Has drummed its way across the age.