Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
The Spur of Monmouth
By Henry Morford (1823–1881)’T
Deep gnawed by rust and stain,
That the farmer’s urchin brought me,
Ploughed up in old Monmouth’s plain;
On that spot where the hot June sunshine
Once a fire more deadly knew,
And a bloodier color reddened
Where the red June roses blew;—
Looked down through the shimmering leaves,
And saw where the reaper of battle
Had gathered his human sheaves:
Old Monmouth, so touched with glory,
So tinted with burning shame,
As Washington’s pride we remember,
Or Lee’s long-tarnished name.
And knocking the rust away,
And clearing the ends and the middle
From their burial-shroud of clay,
I saw, through the damp of ages,
And the thick, disfiguring grime,
The buckle-heads and the rowel
Of a spur of the olden time.
Who revels and rides no more,
Perhaps twenty years back, or fifty,
On his heel that weapon wore?
Was he riding away to his bridal,
When the leather snapped in twain?
Was he thrown, and dragged by the stirrup,
With the rough stones crushing his brain?”
Whose tide still onward rolls;
Of the free and the fearless riders,
Of the “times that tried men’s souls.”
What if, in the day of battle
That raged and rioted here,
It had dropped from the foot of a soldier,
As he rode in his mad career?
When he leaped through the open door,
With the British dragoon behind him,
In his race o’er the granary-floor?
What if—but the brain grows dizzy
With the thoughts of the rusted spur—
What if it had fled with Clinton,
Or charged with Aaron Burr?
Had been scraping the rust away;
And, cleaned from the soil that swathed it,
The spur before me lay.
Here are holes in the outer circle;
No common heel it has known,
For each space, I see by the setting,
Once held some precious stone.
Do my eyes deceive their sight?—
Two letters are here engraven,
That initial a hero’s might!—
“G. W.!” Saints of heaven!—
Can such things in our lives occur?
Do I grasp such a priceless treasure?
Was this George Washington’s spur?
Wear that spur, like a belted knight,—
Wear it, through gain and disaster,
From Cambridge to Monmouth fight?
Did it press his steed in hot anger
On Long Island’s day of pain?
Did it drive him at terrible Princeton
’Tween two streams of leaden rain?
And no eye look down to see,
When he rode to blast with the lightning
The defiant eyes of Lee?
Did it fall, unfelt and unheeded,
When that fight of despair was won,
And Clinton, worn and discouraged,
Crept away at the set of the sun?
That could send an answer back;
And the spur, all broken and rusted,
Has it forgotten its rider’s track?
I only know that the pulses
Leap hot, and the senses reel,
When I think that the Spur of Monmouth
May have clasped George Washington’s heel!