I had a vaguely negative impression (mainly received rather than first-hand) of Herman Melville’s abilities as a poet; but “Shiloh” is pretty strong.
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh —
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh —
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there —
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve —
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.
A military sentimentality I can get behind. The density of rhyme is certainly artificial, and the specific rhymes could be criticized as “easy”; but they’re effective nonetheless. For example, in lone/one/groan, the weak word is “one”, but since it’s weak both semantically and phonetically, there’s a harmony to the choice; the result is almost as if the line division had fallen four syllables earlier. And I always appreciate a layered temporal perspective: the foreground, so to speak, is the present, with swallows in clouded days, and the background is the famous battle, but the focus of the poem is on a middle ground, the night after the battle, in which the foemen painfully died.
(I have no special occasion to post this — I happened on an old bookmark.)
UPDATE: Restored thanks to Eric’s quick warning and Google’s all-seeing cache.
The Edge of the American West 
35 comments
June 24, 2010 at 2:46 am
kid bitzer
” the focus of the poem is on a middle ground, the night after the battle”
hate to venture an opinion on a matter of history, but i think you may have misunderstood the timeline of shiloh.
the first day of the battle, consisting of a successful onslaught by the insurgents and a gradual retreat by the national army, occupied all of sunday.
on sunday night, grant was reinforced by don carlos buell and 15,000 troops.
the second day of the battle, on monday, saw the insurgents pushed back and scattered, fleeing to corinth, ms.
so melville has chosen the halfway-point in the battle (the “pause”) between the severe difficulties of the first day, and the triumph of the second.
“what like a bullet can undeceive?” is a great line.
June 24, 2010 at 5:03 am
Guan Yang
Where did the poem go?
June 24, 2010 at 5:05 am
eric
WordPress’s blogging application ate it. I’m sorry. I’m hoping we can fix it.
June 24, 2010 at 5:09 am
Guan Yang
I have a copy from my news reader that I can email, if that helps.
June 24, 2010 at 5:44 am
Vance
Restored, thanks. (It had been updated in my RSS reader, but Google knows.)
Good point, kb. Melville lingers on the moment of failure, expecting us to remember the rest. Grant’s sanguinary determination (“Lick ’em tomorrow, though”) would be out of place.
The phrase “natural prayer” is enigmatic. The soldiers were presumably saying various things, but most of what the waiting armies heard was their screams of mortal pain.
June 24, 2010 at 11:11 am
Charlieford
Nice analysis. I’d say a good poem, no more, but Melville-lovers are always grateful for even a good one. (Just as an aside, I’m a little shocked at how many people who should know better disparage MOBY-DICK.) And yeah, “What like a bullet can undeceive!” gets way up there.
June 24, 2010 at 11:31 am
bitchphd
I like the poem, too (and Melville generally). Agreed about the artificiality of the rhymes but it manages to avoid sing-songiness by staggering the rhyme scheme quite nicely.
June 24, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Califury
For what it is worth:
“St Macarios’ central doctrine was that in order for someone to go beyond the highest state that a human can reach in prayer, that is, advance from “natural prayer” to “true prayer,” the Holy Spirit has to intervene in order to teach the individual’s soul and provide clear spiritual direction. ”
John K. Kotsonis: Christian Mysticism During the Early and Middle Byzantine Periods Part I: St Macarios and St. Maximus Confessor.
Theandros, Volume 5, number 2, Winter 2007/2008.
If Melville identified the shrieks of agony as parallel to the highest state a human can reach, perhaps then the shrieking wounded have reached the highest state of warfare that a man can reach.
June 24, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Vance
That’s interesting! I wonder how likely it is that Melville would have known about St. Macarius. More mundanely, maybe the point is that the dying words were not formal prayers sanctioned by tradition but spontaneous & thus natural addresses to God.
June 24, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Califury
Vance, I expect you’re correct.
According to my understanding, Shiloh was the name of the Methodist Church (the log church) around which the battle was fought.
http://www.hmdb.org/Marker.asp?Marker=31794
John Wesley (a founder of Methodism) knew of Macarius: “I have read [the The Fifty Spiritual Homilies of] Macarius and my heart sang.” I can imagine that Melville was familiar with Wesley and Methodist doctrine.
June 25, 2010 at 5:14 am
jim
“What like a bullet can undeceive!” implies that the dying soldiers had been deceived (and are now, struck by bullets, undeceived). On both sides, too (“Foemen at morn, but friends at eve”). And, by extension, the surviving soldiers on both sides. Who had deceived them? About what?
June 25, 2010 at 5:53 am
Vance
The line before is “Fame or country least their care” — suggesting that from their point of view, concern for fame and country seemed now like a deception. (That they became “friends” in the process goes with the loss of interest in “country”.)
June 25, 2010 at 8:58 am
Califury
It is (could be) an interesting conceit to use the Shiloh Methodist Church, an absence of God from the battlefield around the church (“Natural” prayers are made without the assistance of the Holy Spirit–“Where is God when I need him?”) and deception with respect to Fame, country and perhaps God to show the inherent horror of running into a bullet for lies.
June 25, 2010 at 10:04 am
Vance
The actual words are so few that we shouldn’t expect to arrive at a definitive unpacking. But I do think Melville opened the poem up to such extrapolations.
When the phrase first tugged at my ear, I went Googling and was reminded of the saying that “attention is the natural prayer of the soul”, out of Malebranche — I think I knew it from readings around Paul Celan. But I don’t think that fits here; despite the understatement, the prayers are obviously in extremis, more urgent than meditative attention.
June 25, 2010 at 10:46 am
Ralph Hitchens
“Who had deceived them? About what?” To me it suggests that being on the receiving end of a bullet would make one reevaluate the motivation — Patriotism? States rights? Preserving the Union? — that put you in the path of that bullet and might now mean the forfeit of your life.
June 25, 2010 at 7:22 pm
ch
If you’re lucky enough to have Project Muse access, see here:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/public_culture/v015/15.1warner.html
June 25, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Vance
Dang, I’m not. I’ll have to go visit the physical library after all (see tags).
June 25, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Vance
I was going to comment unkindly that the swallows seem to have been suggested by the choice to rhyme “Shiloh” with “fly low”, when I remembered another, more melodious swallow-poem:
which turns out to have been published in the same year, as if the idea of the swallow as figure of forgetfulness of grief were not only mythologically grounded but somehow contagious in the Victorian air.
June 26, 2010 at 3:18 am
kid bitzer
halleck had sent grant to pittsburgh landing in order to advance on corinth ms, where two major rail-lines crossed.
a question for the historians:
water transport and its hubs and choke-points have been fought over forever–battles and fortifications dot the river-bends, confluences, fords, harbors, and passageways of this country and the world, from vicksburg to corregidor to constantinople. that’s how it goes when water is the best highway.
but when did rail transport become important enough to fight over? can you think of a major battle fought for control of a rail line, prior to shiloh?
are there any prior to the civil war? is this another way in which the civil war was a war of new technologies? i ask from pure ignorance–there may be obvious earlier ones i just don’t know about.
June 26, 2010 at 4:02 am
jim
can you think of a major battle fought for control of a rail line
Manassas
June 26, 2010 at 4:16 am
kid bitzer
sounds right, jim, assuming you meant second manassas. (first looks like it had other objectives).
any earlier bidders?
June 26, 2010 at 4:17 am
jim
Thanks to ch for pointing to the Warner article.
But I think Warner is wrong here:
“To imagine that the men have been injured by such agents as fame or country is of course to shift our attention from a social conflict to an inner struggle.”
Thy have been injured by those who told them that fame and country were worth dying for. Earlier in the piece Warner opposes “Shiloh” to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Let us die to make men free.” Well, that’s what the men in “Shiloh” are doing.
June 26, 2010 at 4:20 am
kid bitzer
oops wait a sec. looks like second manassas comes after shiloh (august ’62 vs. april ’62).
June 26, 2010 at 4:24 am
Erik Lund
IIRC, the first railway march to reach public attention was a peacetime redeployment of British garrison troops, perhaps on their way to Ireland, in 1820. Rail deployments played an important role in various crises short of war thereafter, but the first widespread use of railways in war took place during the fighting of 1848, in which any number of towns with railways were attacked and defended.
The single most important logistical campaign of 1848 would almost qualify. Radetzky’s defence of the Quadrilateral covered the Austro-Hungarian debouchment into Italy. However, no railways had yet been built across the Alps, so we are still just talking about regular roads.
By 1859 the Venice-Milan railway had been built, so the Franco-Sardinian capture of Milan definitely qualifies, even if Milan was a important for enough other reasons that we hardly care.
In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, railway and even subway building became thoroughly integrated into strategic planning, especially with regards to fortress siting, and most of the big battles of WWI, and even more so WWII are intimately associated with railway nodal points. (This was the big thing that John Moser convinced himself that he had discovered, if anyone recalls the great to-do over his “history” of WWI.)
That still leaves us at loose ends trying to unpack the whys and wherefores. In the American case, it may be as simple as that written history is an innovation that does not predate the railway by very much. If America had had military correspondents in 1400, maybe we would be talking about a third or fourth battle of Shiloh, because it would turn out that it was a railway node for the same reason that it had previously been a fortress and/or battlefield, just as Verdun was a “historic” as well as a modern fort in 1915.
“Maybe” obviously is not an explanation. I think one does exist, but it will turn out to be a complicated one, a wonderful, tied-up ball of geography and nineteenth century Progress with a capital “P.” To better understand it, we’d need to get into land reclamation, urban planning, rail commuting, reinforced-concrete architecture, electric grids, mass-mobilisation armies, artificial explosives and aviation.
Someone should write a book about it.
June 26, 2010 at 4:37 am
kid bitzer
great to get some european stuff, erik.
on shiloh–although pittsburgh landing itself (i.e. the topographical/geological location of the battle of shiloh) is a water-node (roughly, the highest point upstream on the tennessee that is reliably navigable even in low-water seasons), corinth ms. by contrast would have been of no topographical interest before the advent of railroads, so far as i can tell.
i agree it is important to sort out places that are of strategic importance because they have a railroad (e.g. corinth, i allege), from places that have a railroad because they are of strategic importance for other reasons (e.g. charing cross, berlin). and rail lines can follow older water-courses as well, further muddying the tracks.
June 26, 2010 at 5:44 am
Erik Lund
Well, there’s any number of reasons why roads (and railways) exist where they do, or don’t. In at least two cases that I can think of (the border between Belgium and Holland and between Indian and Burma), strategy is constrained because roads peter out. Not just because it’s so, but because there is a pan of soft-bottom land wide enough that the middle is past some critical distance from the nearest quarry, so that you can’t economically dump gravel.
No metalled roads means no armies, and, in the wet season, no road at all. Both gaps are important in military history –the Belgium/Holland one across many centuries, the India-Burma one in WWII. Railways famously overcome these problems in part, since you can always use the rails to cart stuff up to the railhead, but they have their own limits. (The technology did not then exist to build a rail line across the Brahmaputra. I have no idea about any geographical reasons why a rail crossing might have been stuck at Corinth.)
BTW, anyone interested might want to track down the _Civil Engineering in World War II_ collection put out by the ICE, and Bernhard Kloester’s military-technical history of the development of the Austro-Hungarian rail net. Though I’m not sure that anyone has written about the lack of quarries around s’Hertogenbusch and the results for world history.
June 26, 2010 at 5:46 am
jim
kb: I was never good at dates. Railroads are intrinsic to the Civil War. Retreating troops tore up tracks behind them.
On further thought, let me take back that Warner is wrong about inner struggle. But the inner struggle is Melville’s. Melville is among those undeceived by bullets. He had been, still was, as pro-Union, as anti-slavery as Julia Ward Howe (well, almost). But he had not envisaged this mechanical slaughter.
June 26, 2010 at 7:31 am
Vance
Wow — the pent-up demand for history blogging here is palpable. Swinburne, possibly not so much.
June 26, 2010 at 8:47 am
Erik Lund
I, for one, welcome our new Swinburne-blogging overlords.
June 27, 2010 at 5:41 am
kid bitzer
given his love for feminine endings, swinburne would surely have crafted a rollicking terza rima with “blogging”, “slogging” and “snogging”.
June 27, 2010 at 4:45 pm
kid bitzer
and back to history for a sec:
why *were* those damned rivers so angry in the civil war?
seems like every time a bunch of people get slaughtered, it’s because one river up and recruited an army, and another river had to do the same.
the potomac had an army. the mississippi had one too. the ohio river–you’d think that would be a peaceable river, right? nope: it’s got a army, and so does the tennessee.
don’t they know this is supposed to be a war between the states? so why can’t they let the army of mississippi slug it out with the army of ohio? no, no–the states play no role at all. there is no “army of mississippi” or “army of ohio”. it’s the army of *the* mississippi, the army of *the* ohio, and so on–it’s the rivers that have the damned armies. all the way up to the army of the potomac, which is a pretty pathetic, third-rate trickle in any case.
what the hell is up with that?
June 28, 2010 at 4:30 am
rea
Kid–you’re wrong. Union armies were named after rivers; Confederate armies were named after states. The Army of the Potomac (and later, the Amies of the James and the Shenandoah) confronted the Army of Northern Virginia, while the Armies of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio confronted the Army of Tennessee.
June 28, 2010 at 4:50 am
rea
The Tennessee River, by the way, was navigable well above Pittsburg Landing year round. The crucial obstacle to low-water navigation was Muscle Shoals, near Florence, Alabama. Steam boats could make it all the way to Knoxville during high water. The significance of Pittsburg Landing was that it was a good camping site near the river’s closest approach to the rail junction at Corinth. Corinth ws the crucial junction bwteen the Memphis to Richmond east-west line and the Paducah to New Orleans or Mobile north-south lines.
June 28, 2010 at 7:04 am
ajay
The tradition neither started nor finished with the US Civil War. The British Army of the Indus invaded Afghanistan in 1839; the British Army of the Rhine was stationed in western Germany until 1994.
June 28, 2010 at 7:14 am
kid bitzer
“Kid–you’re wrong.”
huh. looks like i *am* wrong. the army of bitzer yields to the army of rea. somehow i had it in my head that the insurgents also named their armies after rivers, but i was misinformed.
interesting to hear ajay’s british comparanda. so when does it start, and what is the rationale? and for that matter, what is the rationale such that the national army in the civil war adopted it, but the insurgents rejected it?