Come Up from the Fields Father

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete, / And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son. // Lo, ’tis autumn, / Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, / Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind, / Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines, / (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines? / Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?) // Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds, / Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well. // Down in the fields all prospers well, / But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call. / And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away. // Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling, / She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap. // Open the envelope quickly, / O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d, / O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul! / All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only, / Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital, / At present low, but will soon be better. // Ah now the single figure to me, / Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms, / Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint, / By the jamb of a door leans. // Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs, / The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,) / See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better. // Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,) / While they stand at home at the door he is dead already, / The only son is dead. // But the mother needs to be better, / She with thin form presently drest in black, / By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking, / In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing, / O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw, / To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.