Then the staff⁠—then little Sorrel⁠—and the plain Presbyterian figure in the flat cap, Throwing his left hand out in the awkward gesture That caught the bullet out of the air at Bull Run, Awkward, rugged and dour, the belated Ironside With the curious, brilliant streak of the cavalier That made him quote Mercutio in staff instructions, Love lancet windows, the color of passion-flowers, Mexican sun and all fierce, taut-looking fine creatures; Stonewall Jackson, wrapped in his beard and his silence, Cromwell-eyed and ready with Cromwell’s short Bleak remedy for doubters and fools and enemies, Hard on his followers, harder on his foes, An iron sabre vowed to an iron Lord, And yet the only man of those men who pass With a strange, secretive grain of harsh poetry Hidden so deep in the stony sides of his heart That it shines by flashes only and then is gone. It glitters in his last words. He is deeply ambitious, The skilled man, utterly sure of his own skill And taking no nonsense about it from the unskilled,