Drum-Taps

Description

FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE.



First O songs for a prelude,

Lightly strike on the stretch’d tympanum pride and joy in my city,

How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,

How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,

(O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!

O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)

How you sprang-how you threw off the costumes of peace with

indifferent hand,

How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard

in their stead,

How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of

soldiers,)

How Manhattan drum-taps led.



Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading,

Forty years as a pageant, still unawares the lady of this teeming and

turbulent city,

Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,

With her million children around her, suddenly,

At dead of night, at news from the south,

Incens’d struck with clinch’d hand the pavement.



A shock electric, the night sustain’d it,

Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour’d out its myriads.

From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,

Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.



To the drum-taps prompt,

The young men falling in and arming,

The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith’s

hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)

The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the

court,
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