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“Shiloh: A Requiem,” By Herman Melville
In honor of Memorial Day, I wanted to present a poem that captured the ultimate sacrifice of our military, and this poem by Herman Melville was intriguing and fit the bill. Yes, this is the famous Herman Melville, author of the great—and to some—greatest American novel, Moby Dick. Melville, after early success with his romanticized sailing adventures—which were a comingling of biography and tall tale—turned to serious fiction, and though in retrospect he has been revised to be considered one of the great American novelists, in his day was met with both critical and financial rejection. It was not until almost thirty years after his death that he was reassessed to receive the stature he deserves.
After about a decade of writing novels, and being rejected, Melville turned to poetry. That too was met with critical and financial rejection. He is not as widely known as a poet, but some of his poetry is impressive. In some ways, Melville’s poetry is the opposite of his prose. Melville’s prose is mellifluous, rhythmic, and at times reaches the heights of Shakespearean poetry. His poetry is noticeably the opposite: hard, minimalist, and bare. In the 1860s, with the country torn apart by the Civil War, Melville decided to visit some of the battlefields and capture something of the war in poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was the book that came out from it, a collection of 72 poems.
“Shiloh: A Requiem” is one such poem, capturing something of the Battle of Shiloh. This was one Ulysses S. Grant’s first victories in April of 1862, prior to being the appointed Commanding General of the Union Army. What’s important in understanding the poem is that the battle centered on a church building in Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, and had 24,000 casualties, a truly bloody affair. The Union won this battle but actually lost more men than the South.
First, I am going to present the poem in the way it was published, devoid of stanzas. Then I am going to represent the poem separated into what I think are its natural divisions of five sections. I represent it this way because it seems easier to read and digest. Here is the published format.
Shiloh: A Requiem
By Herman Melville (1819-1891)
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.
Here is a YouTube video providing the details of the battle, and a reading of Melville’s poem.
Now here are the five sections as I see it. I added some line numbers as well off to the right.
I
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh— 4
II
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— 9
III
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there— 13
IV
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!) 16
V
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh. 19
Let’s walk through the five sections. The first describes the scene well after the battle, perhaps when Melville himself got there, possibly after the war but certainly after the battle. Shiloh here refers to the field on which the battle took place, and the swallows flying about do not give any indication of the agony and turmoil that ensued. The swallows might symbolize nature’s reverence for the dead. The section ends with what will be the first of three refrains using the name “Shiloh.” It should be noted that Shiloh, TN, was named after the Old Testament city of Shiloh, a religious center in the pre-monarchial days. While the biblical city had nothing to do with the battle, Melville uses the religious association as a theme in the poem.
In section II, Melville takes us back to the night between the battle where the injured lay in agony. The battle took place on April 6 and 7, a Sunday and Monday. So the April rain “solaced” the men who lay dying on Sunday night. From the Wikipedia entry on the battle, “It began raining at 10:00 pm, and at midnight the rain became a storm with thunder and lightning.” So implied in the poem is that the battle started on the Lord’s Day, and by night the dying were baptized with rain. The use of the word, “solace” is charged here. Who would actually be solaced by having to endure rain in the outdoors, except were it to have a religious connotation? The refrain now refers to the Church of Shiloh.
In Section III, Melville calls forth the church building, a simple, natural edifice built of logs. The church is characterized as single, even universal. It does not distinguish between the sides, neither being a church for the Union nor one for the Confederate. All suffering in agony pray there with their “groans.” Melville identifies it as a “natural prayer,” coordinating it with the natural edifice. There is no denomination identified or even specific theology. In the existential crises of painful death, man, undistinguished between Union and Confederate—“mingled” enemies—come to God.
In Section IV, we come to what I think is the intellectual core of the poem. In the face of death and God, enemies who had just fought to kill each other become “friends,” realizing the brotherhood of man. Whatever had inspired them to fight is now meaningless. These were just illusions, romanticized notions. The central theme is written as a parenthetical sentence, an apparent mere side note. But like the Fool in King Lear, the side note speaks with true depth. “What like a bullet can undeceive!” The bullet is the true reality. It not only has killed bodily, but it has killed whatever romantic notions you may have had about war.
The final section returns to the present field, where the dead have been put to rest, and to the poem’s beginning image of the swallows flying. But having taken us through the dying men at the church, Melville now instills more meaning to the scene. There is silence, and the flying birds provide a natural reverence to those who have died. It recalls two sentences from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, though I don’t know if Melville was conscious of it. Here Lincoln is referring to another battlefield filled with dead soldiers.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
Melville with the swallows flying in the silence imputes a natural consecration to the battle field of Shiloh. So now that final refrain of Shiloh neither refers to the town or the church, but to the resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Eternal rest in peace to those and all American soldiers fallen in our service.
Published in Literature
Great post, Manny. I remember reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant, and his description of Grant walking through the field after the battle. I can’t quote a single line, but the imagery was one of desolation and horror.
Yeah, I think the Grant quote was something to the effect of being able to step from one body to the next and not needing to touch the ground.
“I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground”
Yes, that’s it. Thank you Mike.
Thanks to you and Manny. Now I know why the image was burned into my brain, but not the words.
I have read a lot of war poetry, but I had not heard of that one. It is beautiful and powerful. Two of the poems that I remembered from my poetry class in 9th grade had a similar theme: nature reclaiming the fields from the carnage.
There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
Only she ends, unlike Melville, with their indifference to the fate of men:
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done…
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Carl Sanberg’s The Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this? Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
When you visit these battlefields, they are so peaceful, beautiful and solemn. You always hear the birds singing and the bugs chirping, the trees rustling and the wind blowing. And even when I close my eyes, I find it hard to picture what they would have looked or smelled like or sounded like during and after the battle. The violence, the carnage and the grief. I suppose that it is good that the land heals and beauty and life return. But not for those who fell. And that is why we remember today.
I remember having that impression when we visited Gettysburg, as we saw the green grass and where they would have put their fragile dwellings.
Thank you. I have not heard of Sarah Teasdale. I’ll look her up.
One of the few books I saved from college was James Lee McDonough’s Shiloh–In Hell Before Night. It’s still in print. One thing I have noted as I have made the roadtrip a couple of times from Illinois to Florida is the respect along the way for the battles and battlefields of the Civil War.
Foemen…what a word.
The battle in the Crimea in the mid 1850s was the first time the results of a battle were recorded on film. The images were incredibly shocking to those who saw them. There was nothing glorious about the manner and shapes that death took when men were slaughtered in vast numbers. Then came the images from Shiloh and Antietam. Rows upon rows of mangled bodies piled unceremoniously over the savaged fields.
It was impossible to reimagine war in the glorious heroic terms it had been described in prior to that time. The contrast between the twisted remains showing the final agonies of men who died of horrible wounds and lay unattended over the field while battle continued through the long hours, and no one could comfort them. The field hospitals with piles of amputated limbs outside added further horrors.
Quite suddenly Idylls of the King with its description of the heroic, dying Arthur handing off Excalibur so that it could be returned to the Lady of the Lake lost any sense of beauty, of romance. War would never again be seen as glorious, and its consequences were best described in a new form of poetry, like Melville’s above and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est. ” Death in combat ceased to be glorious and became tragic. Lives weren’t just lost, they were wasted.
This does not in any way diminish the individual sacrifices made by the young men whose stones line the various fields set aside for them. It does give greater meaning to those sacrifices, the real price each paid in his final hours or seconds. They weren’t glorious or heroic as many were promised. They were gross and vile and filled with fear and pain or, at best, quick and done. It is good that we remember those who paid the ultimate price, and that we further fight to sustain that which they gave their all to preserve.
Melville captures this so well in two short lines: