air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn, Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of flail, An old man’s garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out yet, Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.
A Twilight Song
As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame, Musing on long-pass’d war-scenes—of the countless buried unknown soldiers, Of the vacant names, as unindented air’s and sea’s—the unreturn’d, The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the deep-fill’d trenches Of gather’d dead from all America, North, South, East, West, whence they came up, From wooded Maine, New-England’s farms, from fertile Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the Carolinas, Texas, (Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights