Explore "In the Prison Pen. 1864 (Poems from Battle Pieces)" by Herman Melville on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Listless he eyes the palisades / And sentries in the glare; / 'Tis barren as a pelican-beach / But his world is ended there.
Nothing to do; and vacant hands / Bring on the idiot-pain; / He tries to think-to recollect, / But the blur is on his brain.
Around him swarm the plaining ghosts / Like those on Virgil's shore- / A wilderness of faces dim, / And pale ones gashed and hoar.
A smiting sun. No shed, no tree; / He totters to his lair- / A den that sick hands dug in earth / Ere famine wasted there,
Or, dropping in his place, he swoons, / Walled in by throngs that press, / Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead- / Dead in his meagreness.