Dreaming in the Trenches
By William Gordon McCabe (1841�1920) |
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I picture her there
in the quaint old room,
Where the fading fire-light
starts and falls,
Alone in the twilight's tender gloom
With the shadows that dance on the dim-lit walls.
Alone, while those faces look silently down
From their
antique frames in a grim repose--
Slight scholarly Ralph
in his Oxford gown,
And stanch Sir Alan, who died for
Montrose.
There are gallants gay in crimson and gold,
There are smiling beauties with powdered hair,
But she
sits there, fairer a thousand-fold,
Leaning dreamily back
in her low arm-chair.
And the roseate shadows of
fading light
Softly clear, steal over the sweet young
face,
Where a woman's tenderness blends to-night
With
the guileless pride of a knightly race.
Her hands lie
clasped in a listless way
On the old Romance--which she
holds on her knee--
Of Tristram, the bravest of knights
in the fray,
And Iseult, who waits by the sounding sea.
And her proud, dark eyes wear a softened look,
As she
watches the dying embers fall:
Perhaps she dreams of the
knight in the book,
Perhaps of the pictures that smile on
the wall.
What fancies, I wonder, are thronging her
brain,
For her cheeks flush warm with a crimson glow!
Perhaps--ah! me, how foolish and vain!
But I'd give my
life to believe it so.
Well, whether I ever march
home again
To offer my love and a stainless name,
Or
whether I die at the head of my men,
I'll be true to the
end all the same. |
By
William Gordon McCabe (1841�1920)
Listed July 9, 2013The
setting of the poem is the Petersburg Trenches
during a
1864 Civil War battle.
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