Ye ancient dead, who fell with Greece or Rome, Or in the name of Allah and his prophet, Who fell through all the cycled years of war, Through plague, disaster, fell in civil strife, Through revolution, famine, flood and fire, Apocalyptic woe or freezing night, Ye ancient dead, to whom heroic stance And unsurrendered dignity still cling, Receive who come among you now like gods, Four hundred splendid, handsome, golden lads. To them extend that comradship of men Who live the rugged military life, Who smile that full, good-natured kind of smile, Most boyishly unstudied, most beloved, Who know each other’s thoughts and wants and hopes, Who know what prayers are said and what forgot, Who know that greatest, crucifying love Where friends for friends on strange new crosses die! And you, O Seraph Outpost Garrison, Who side by side heroically made stand, No quarter given, none received, none asked, Who fought those vicious legions in the three Old elemental spheres, and of the fourth, Almost invincible to flame and death, Stood firmly placed before, beneath the attack Like Milton’s epic host against all Hell, New rest, brave lads, in consecrated sleep, While lonely trumpets sing through muffled drums A requiem and threnody of grief. Ah, great Cecilia, Bach, and Handel blind, Those last full-throated notes to swell from earth, That trumpet song of loneliness and night, Give it a contrapuntal theme beneath, Whose pedal harmonies orchestrally Shall hint of resurrection, while the pipes And organ-pillar’d flutes resound the mode To which the ancient dead have matched and sung. Then light the strings until they burn as bright And numberless as candles round a shrine, Then start the rolling drums, and set the brass Cannonically recalling one another, And let the reeds’ ancestral wisdom speak, What though at first the grave bassoons must weep Their melancholy, febrile lamentation. Unsheathe the horns and cut the harmonic knot. Let full grand orchestra astound the void With soaring fugue and metric tympani. And in this last, let herald trumpets sing While bright kid-trumpeteers who fell at Pearl Resound a call to quarters there beyond! _CORREGIDOR AND CALVARY_ Corregidor and Calvary, And Christ again is crucified, And all the lovely lads who died Are His this day in Paradise. They hung upon a wretched cross, We watched them day by day, And wondered how such men could live Who hung in such a way, Who hung in thorns of screeching steel And had no time to pray. We knew that soon the lads must die, And yet they battled death Unmindful of his awful wings And black, consuming breath, Unmindful when he roared at them Or whispered what he saith.