''T is But the Graves That Stay'

“Above the town of Frankfort, on the top of the steep bluff of the Kentucky River, is a burial-place where lie the bones of many heroes, sons the Commonwealth has lovingly gathered in one fold. It is a beautiful site for this simple Valhalla, with its wide outlook over the noble vale it crowns, to my eyes wondrously enriched by the sense of a people’s care for the fame of its illustrious dead.” 

Each Memorial Day we walked to my grade school to watch the parade. Standing at the curb we waited for the marching bands, the dignitaries, pretty girls riding in convertibles, the veterans of three or four wars. The city handed out American flags on sticks and we waved them as the brass-heavy bands played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” We followed the parade for half a mile to the Parma Heights Cemetery where my mother is now buried. Prayers, solemn speeches, the firing of bolt-action rifles in a three-gun salute. I was a dim kid and understood nothing I was seeing. Americans have always gathered to honor their war dead, even today.

 

The passage at the top is taken from The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1909). If Shaler (1841-1906) is remembered at all it is as a geologist and paleontologist. When the Civil War started, Shaler (1841-1906) was a student of the great Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. A year away from graduating, Shaler resolved to continue his studies while preparing for war. He joined the university’s drill club, studied infantry tactics, read Jomini’s Traité de grande tactique and each weekend visited Fort Independence in Boston Harbor to learn about artillery.

 

After graduating summa cum laude in 1862, Shaler returned to his native Kentucky, where he was commissioned to raise the Fifth Kentucky Battery on the Union side, despite coming from a slave-owning family. He detested the Republican Party and many of his Kentucky friends had already joined the Confederate cause, but Shaler believed in the Union, which he called “a most useful convenience for uniting like states for protection and interchange.”

 

Shaler served for two years until illness forced his resignation. For almost forty years he taught at Harvard, and late in life wrote the poems collected in From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. Shaler’s wife published the book posthumously. In 2004, R.L. Barth edited and introduced The Selected Civil War Poems of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Scienter Press). Bob is a poet, publisher, Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, and fellow Kentuckian. In his introduction he writes:

 

“Shaler was a Civil War combat veteran; he thought long and hard about combat, war, and soldiering; although a poetic amateur, he had certain poetic skills, chief among them narrative power, an ability to write fluid blank verse, and an eye for telling details, sharply perceived and rendered.”

 

Barth says Shaler’s best poems are “shrewdly observed and profoundly moving.” As the volume’s final selection, Bob includes “The Burial Place,” a poem that echoes the passage at the top taken from Shaler’s Autobiography. It begins:

 

“A hill-top that looked far above the throng

Of brother hills, and into widening vales

Wherein the brooks slip onward to the sea.

A place for castle in old war-torn lands

When might was master: here, the silent hold

Where sleep the dead in earth that looks to sky

For the brave trust in all that dwelleth there.”

 

Visiting the cemetery are an old man and a boy, “in ancient quest / Of place for one more grave . . .” The Civil War and its dead are alluded to obliquely:

 

“’T is not yet two-score years, yet ’t is as far

As Trojan legend to the youth who hears

How o’er this earth of peace tramped demon war,

Treading its hills and vales with feet that scorched

Their goodly life out; how of all that dwelt

Out to the rim of sight, peace stayed alone

With those who abided here in God’s strong arms,

Unheeding Satan’s deeds.”

 

Shaler concludes his poem with a line as final as an epitaph: “’T is but the graves that stay.”

As a coda, here is Bob’s “Meditations After Battle,” collected in Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). The first part is preceded by half of a Virgilian tag from Book I, line 462, of the Aeneid: “sunt lacrimae rerum . . .”:

 

“And all around, the dead! So many dead!

So many ways to die it hurt the heart

To look and feel sun burning overhead.

We stacked the bodies on scorched grass, apart.”

 

Before the second part of the poem is the rest of Virgil’s line: “et mentem mortalia tangunt”:

 

“Death was the context and the only fact.

Amidst the stench, I almost could believe

There was a world of light where, if souls lacked

Broken bodies awhile, they would retrieve

Them, mended; where no one need longer grieve.”

 

The complete line from the Aeneid can be translated “There are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind.”