Poetry
Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1867
Henry Timrod · 1866
Opening lines
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Five quatrains sung before graves without monuments. The poem addresses the dead of a fallen cause, tells them to sleep softly in their humble graves, observes that no marble column marks them, and announces that glory is already germinating in the soil and that the future monument sleeps in the stone. Meanwhile, their sisters come to bring tears and flowers. The text names neither the Confederacy nor the enemy.
Context
The text was sung on 16 June 1866 at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, the anniversary of the Battle of Secessionville: shops closed around noon, a shower delayed the ceremony, and thousands of people attended. Two Charleston dailies printed it on 18 June; a modified version appeared the next day in Columbia, and another, more heavily reworked, on 23 July. The title of the posthumous editions bears the year 1867, which is neither the year of the ceremony nor that of the printing, and several notices have been misled by it.
Who it is for
Five quatrains, with no French translation recorded. Several versions of the text circulate, from June and July 1866.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's most accomplished poem, whom the Southern press already called the poet laureate of the Confederacy.
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