previous next


General Polk.

‘ A flash from the edge of a hostile trench,
A puff of smoke — a roar
Whose echo shall roll from the Kennesaw hills
To the farthermost Christian shore,
Proclaims to the world that the warrior priest
Will battle for right no more,

And that for a cause which is sanctified
By the blood of martyrs unknown--
A cause for which they gave their lives
And for which he gave his own--
He kneels, a meek ambassador,
At the foot of the Father's Throne.

And up in the courts of another world.
That angels alone have trod,
He lives, away from the din and strife
Of this blood-besprinkled son,
Crowned with the amaranthine wreath
That is worn by the blest of God.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Polk (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: