Explore "A Meditation (Poems from Battle Pieces)" by Herman Melville on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How often in the years that close, / When truce had stilled the sieging gun, / The soldiers, mounting on their works, / With mutual curious glance have run / From face to face along the fronting show, / And kinsman spied, or friend-even in a foe.
What thoughts conflicting then were shared, / While sacred tenderness perforce / Welled from the heart and wet the eye; / And something of a strange remorse / Rebelled against the sanctioned sin of blood, / And Christian wars of natural brotherhood.