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Home  »  An American Anthology, 1787–1900  »  558 A Georgia Volunteer

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By Mary AshleyTownsend

558 A Georgia Volunteer

FAR up the lonely mountain-side

My wandering footsteps led;

The moss lay thick beneath my feet,

The pine sighed overhead.

The trace of a dismantled fort

Lay in the forest nave,

And in the shadow near my path

I saw a soldier’s grave.

The bramble wrestled with the weed

Upon the lowly mound;—

The simple head-board, rudely writ,

Had rotted to the ground;

I raised it with a reverent hand,

From dust its words to clear,

But time had blotted all but these—

“A Georgia Volunteer!”

I saw the toad and scaly snake

From tangled covert start,

And hide themselves among the weeds

Above the dead man’s heart;

But undisturbed, in sleep profound,

Unheeding, there he lay;

His coffin but the mountain soil,

His shroud Confederate gray.

I heard the Shenandoah roll

Along the vale below,

I saw the Alleghanies rise

Towards the realms of snow.

The “Valley Campaign” rose to mind—

Its leader’s name—and then

I knew the sleeper had been one

Of Stonewall Jackson’s men.

Yet whence he came, what lip shall say—

Whose tongue will ever tell

What desolated hearths and hearts

Have been because he fell?

What sad-eyed maiden braids her hair,

Her hair which he held dear?

One lock of which perchance lies with

The Georgia Volunteer!

What mother, with long watching eyes,

And white lips cold and dumb,

Waits with appalling patience for

Her darling boy to come?

Her boy! whose mountain grave swells up

But one of many a scar,

Cut on the face of our fair land,

By gory-handed war.

What fights he fought, what wounds he wore,

Are all unknown to fame;

Remember, on his lonely grave

There is not e’en a name!

That he fought well and bravely too,

And held his country dear,

We know, else he had never been

A Georgia Volunteer.

He sleeps—what need to question now

If he were wrong or right?

He knows, ere this, whose cause was just

In God the Father’s sight.

He wields no warlike weapons now,

Returns no foeman’s thrust—

Who but a coward would revile

An honest soldier’s dust?

Roll, Shenandoah, proudly roll,

Adown thy rocky glen,

Above thee lies the grave of one

Of Stonewall Jackson’s men.

Beneath the cedar and the pine,

In solitude austere,

Unknown, unnamed, forgotten, lies

A Georgia Volunteer.