Explore "Where the Battle Passed" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ One blossoming rose-tree, like a beautiful thought / Nursed in a broken mind, that waits and schemes, / Survives, though shattered, and about it caught, / The strangling dodder streams.
/ Gaunt weeds: and here a bayonet or pouch, / Rusty and rotting where men fought and slew: / Bald, trampled paths that seem with fear to crouch, / Feeling a bloody dew.
/ Here nothing that was beauty's once remains. / War left the garden to its dead alone: / And Life and Love, who toiled here, for their pains / Have nothing once their own.
/ Death leans upon the battered door, at gaze -- / The house is silent where there once was stir / Of husbandry, that led laborious days, / With Love for comforter.
/ Now in Love's place, Death, old and halt and blind, / Gropes, searching everywhere for what may live. -- / War left it empty as his vacant mind; / It has no more to give.