The Burial Of Sir John Moore after
Corunna
by
Charles Wolfe
The poem I am going to read here is based on an
incident in the Peninsular War, which was part of the generation-long war
between France, under Napoleon Buonaparte, and pretty much everyone else in
Europe. The “peninsula” in the Peninsula War
was Iberia, which is to say, Spain and Portugal. Napoleon
engineered a coup d’etat in Spain in early 1808, but the Spanish were
unhappy about it, a popular insurrection began, and the British tried to
join in with the Spanish against the French. The
Spanish proved to be difficult allies, though, and a British army under Sir
John Moore was forced to retreat to the port of Corunna, on Spain’s
northwestern tip, from where they were to be evacuated back to Britain.
The retreat had all the problems of
discipline and morale that every retreat
has, with the additional hardships of
bad terrain and appalling weather. Worse
yet; when they got to Corunna on January 11, 1809, the British troopships
that were to evacuate them had not yet arrived, so Sir John had to organize
defenses and fight a battle against the French. In
the battle he was mortally wounded.
The poet Robert Southey wrote an account of these events. His
account was read by Charles Wolfe, a young country parson at a place
named Donaghmore, in Ireland. Wolfe
then wrote this poem, in 1814, when he was 22 years old. The
poem was published in a provincial Irish newspaper three
years later. Lord Byron discovered it
five years after that, admired
it tremendously, but did not know who had written it.
Wolfe was not conclusively
identified as the author until after his death from TB, in 1823, at age 31.
(Listen to the reading)
Not a drum was heard, not a
funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lanthorn dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollow'd his narrow bed
And smooth'd down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that 's gone,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him—
But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we left him alone with his glory.
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