A Nameless Grave

“A soldier of the Union mustered out,”

Is the inscription on an unknown grave

At Newport News, beside the salt-sea wave,

Nameless and dateless; sentinel or scout

Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout

Of battle, when the loud artillery drave

Its iron wedges through the ranks of brave

And doomed battalions, storming the redoubt.

Thou unknown hero sleeping by the sea

In thy forgotten grave! with secret shame

I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn,

When I remember thou hast given for me

All that thou hadst, thy life, thy very name,

And I can give thee nothing in return.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was born in Portland, graduated from Bowdoin College, and taught at Harvard, where he became a world-renowned scholar and translator, and one of the four most widely read American poets of all time. Of the other three, two also were Mainers – Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The fourth, Robert Frost, lived much of his life around the corner in New Hampshire and Vermont. Longfellow’s “A Nameless Grave,” written for a Civil War soldier, ends on a note still painfully familiar in 2006.

Uni-Verse offers a poem grown from the experience of Maine semimonthly in Monday’s Discovering section. Submissions of poems are welcome. Poems of fewer than 20 lines are considered, and poems must have a clear connection to Maine. Because of space limitations on the BDN’s pages, only a small number of poems submitted are able to be used. Electronic submissions may be made as text file attachments to poetry@bangordailynews.net. Hard copy submissions may be made to Dana Wilde, Uni-Verse editor, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04401.