Passages from John Brown’s Body

Love as a hawk you feed your own heart to.

Sally Dupré, from the high porch of her houseStared at the road. They would be here soon enough.She had waved a flag the last time they went away.This time she would wave her hand or her handkerchief.That was what women did. The column passed byAnd the women waved, and it came back and they waved,And, in between, if you loved, you lived by a dullClock of long minutes that passed like sunbonneted womenEach with the same dry face and the same set hands.I have read, they have told me that love is a pretty godWith light wings stuck to his shoulders. They did not tell meThat love is nursing a hawk with yellow eyes,That love is feeding your heart to the beak of the hawkBecause an old woman, gossiping, uttered a name.

History can dress a man in uniform but cannot say what he felt.

He was a man, and as a man he knewLove, separation, sorrow, joy and death.He was a master of the tricks of war,He gave great strokes and warded strokes as great.He was the prop and pillar of a State,The incarnation of a national dream,And when the State fell and the dream dissolvedHe must have lived with bitterness itself—But what his sorrow was and what his joy,And how he felt in the expense of strength,And how his heart contained its bitterness,He will not tell us. We can lie about him,Dress up a dummy in his uniformAnd put our words into the dummy’s mouth,Say “Here Lee must have thought,” and “There, no doubt,By what we know of him, we may supposeHe felt—this pang or that—” but he remainsBeyond our stagecraft, reticent as ice,Reticent as the fire within the stone.

What a court calls justice depends on whose sake you broke the law.

Had I interfered in the matter which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved … had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, or the so-called great … and suffered and sacrificed, what I have in this interference, it would have been all right. Every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

The patience of an ugly child, turned into a political method.

That is my only virtue as I see it,Ability to wait and hold my ownAnd keep my own resolves once they are madeIn spite of what the smarter people say.I can’t be smart the way that they are smart.I’ve known that since I was an ugly child.It teaches you—to be an ugly child.It teaches you—to lose a thing you love.It sticks your roots down into Sangamon groundAnd makes you grow when you don’t want to growAnd makes you tough enough to wait life out,Wait like the fields, under the rain and snow.

A war arrives in a country that was only ever a farm.

They came on to fish-hook Gettysburg in this way, after this fashion.Over hot pikes heavy with pollen, past fields where the wheat was high.Peaches grew in the orchards; it was a fertile country,Full of red barns and fresh springs and dun, deep-uddered kine.A farmer lived with a clear stream that ran through his very house-room,They cooled the butter in it and the milk, in their wide, stone jars;A dusty Georgian came there, to eat and go on to battle;They dipped the milk from the jars, it was cold and sweet in his mouth.