POEMS

FROM 1860 TO 1868.

JOHN BURNS OF GETTYSBURG.

H

AVE you heard the story that gossips tell

Of Burns of Gettysburg?—No? Ah, well:

Brief is the glory that hero earns,

Briefer the story of poor John Burns:

He was the fellow who won renown,

The only man who did n't back down

When the rebels rode through his native town:

But held his own in the fight next day,

When all his townsfolk ran away.

That was in July, sixty-three,

The very day that General Lee,

Flower of Southern chivalry,

Baffled and beaten, backward reeled

From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.

I might tell how, but the day before,

John Burns stood at his cottage door,

Looking down the village street,

Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;
Or I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell, in a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood!

Or how he fancied the hum of bees

Were bullets buzzing among the trees.

But all such fanciful thoughts as these

Were strange to a practical man like Burns,

Who minded only his own concerns,

Troubled no more by fancies fine

Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kine,

Quite old-fashioned and matter-of-fact,

Slow to argue, but quick to act.

That was the reason, as some folk say,

He fought so well on that terrible day.

And it was terrible. On the right

Raged for hours the heady fight,

Thundered the battery's double bass,

Difficult music for men to face;

While on the left where now the graves

Undulate like the living waves

That all that day unceasing swept

Up to the pits the rebels kept

Round shot ploughed the upland glades,

Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;

Shattered fences here and there

Tossed their splinters in the air;