To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War

2. “We are Here at Our Country’s Call”: Nationalist Commitments and Personal Stances in Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Poems

41 chapter two “WE ARE HERE AT OUR COUNTRY’S CALL” Nationalist Commitments and Personal Stances in Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Poems On a rainy Decoration Day in May 1869, George Bryant Woods was one of a number of invited speakers who stood before the monument for fallen soldiers in his hometown of Barre, Massachusetts. As an eighteen-yearold , Woods had served for six months as a private in the Eighth Massachusetts Battery before returning to his civilian job as a journalist and newspaper editor. His speech offers memories of other young Barre men who enlisted in the war’s early years and describes their combat service. At Antietam, in the midst of artillery fire, Woods finds a Barre friend who is fighting with the Twenty-First Massachusetts Infantry and, with the soldier’s hunger for news from home, eagerly reads the friend’s recent copy of the Barre Gazette until the Twenty-First receives its orders to advance. Among the men moving forward in that line, Woods recognizes another face from the Barre school he had attended just a few years before. Describing the encounter, Woods points toward the kinds of literary models of heroism that shape young men’s decisions as they moved from the schoolroom to the enlistment office to the battlefield: I noticed especially the bright young face and gallant bearing of a young lieutenant, only lately risen from the ranks, who had been a schoolmate of my own, when he came up from the Plain to attend the High School. We had declaimed “The Charge of the Light  chapter two 42 Brigade” for the stage of the Town House in those boyish days, little thinking we should ever know the real meaning of war. He was at the further end of the line; so I could not speak to him; but he smiled and touched his cap as he tightened his belt and slung his sword. Then he led his company up to the precipice, into the jaws of death; and in five minutes he was down; and we read on the monument today the name of Henry Holbrook.1 Woods’s childhood memory of reciting Tennyson’s ringing dactyls at the town hall with Holbrook underlines the ways in which poetry worked to define and confirm the bonds of community and nation in nineteenthcentury America: in a Massachusetts town in the late 1850s, a time of growing tensions between North and South, a group of boys on the verge of becoming men declaimed “The Charge of the Light Brigade” for an assembled audience of parents and townspeople.2 Though Woods notes the boys had little idea that they would “ever know the real meaning of war,” the choice of poems underlines a patriotic military ideal for which the boys are implicitly being urged to strive: proving allegiance to one’s country by obeying the orders of commanding officers, proving allegiance to one’s country by risking one’s life in war. The public recitation of the poem confirms for the Barre audience that a new generation of young men will be willing to fight and die for the idea of the nation.3 Echoes of Tennyson’s poem in Woods’s Decoration Day eulogy for Holbrook signal that poetry is still working to support that idea of nation-building in the war’s aftermath. Moreover, these echoes of Tennyson’s phrasing also suggest that many who fought in the Civil War and many who wrote about it perceived the actions of its soldiers through the lens of this poem, which celebrates the courage of the nameless British cavalrymen even as it also questions the wisdom of the officers who ordered the ill-fated charge.4 Woods sees in Tennyson’s poem both a model for masculine heroism and a model for the literary representation of that heroism.5 Tennyson’s popular ballad shapes the wartime writings both of now canonical writers like Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville and of the many soldiers who turned to poetry as a means of representing their experience. The ubiquitousness of echoes of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” throughout the literature of the Civil War underlines the crucial role that poetry played in shaping wartime ideologies. “we are here at our country's call” 43 WhileWoods’smemoryofrecitingTennysonunderlinesthecentralityof poetry to those ideologies, it also points toward the fact that soldiers...