But the mother needs to be better;
She, with thin form, presently dressed in black;
By day her meals untouched--then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed--silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son!
_WAR DREAMS._
1.
In clouds descending, in midnight sleep, of many a face in battle,
Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, of that indescribable look,
Of the dead on their backs, with arms extended wide--
I dream, I dream, I dream.
2.
Of scenes of nature, the fields and the mountains,
Of the skies so beauteous after the storm, and at night the
moon so unearthly bright,
Shining sweetly, shining down, where we dig the trenches,
and gather the heaps--
I dream, I dream, I dream.
3.
Long have they passed, long lapsed--faces, and trenches, and fields:
Long through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the
fallen
Onward I sped at the time. But now of their faces and forms, at night,
I dream, I dream, I dream.
_THE VETERAN'S VISION._
While my wife at my side lies slumbering, and the wars are over long,
And my head on the pillow rests at home, and the mystic midnight passes,
And through the stillness, through the dark, I hear, just hear, the breath
of my infant,
There in the room, as I wake from sleep, this vision presses upon me.
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