Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
In the Prison Pen
By Herman Melville (18191891)[From Battle Pieces, and Aspects of the War. 1866.]
L
And sentries in the glare;
’Tis barren as a pelican-beach,
But his world is ended there.
Bring on the idiot-pain;
He tries to think—to recollect,
But the blur is on his brain.
Like those on Virgil’s shore—
A wilderness of faces dim,
And pale ones gashed and hoar.
He totters to his lair—
A den that sick hands dug in earth
Ere famine wasted there;
Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead—
Dead in his meagreness.