Sherry Chandler

Theodore O’Hara

According to the bio in Kentucky Eloquence Past and Present:

Colonel Theodore O’Hara, poet, soldier and filibuster, was born in Danville, Ky., February 11, 1820. He died June 7. 1867, on a plantation in Alabama, where he was first buried. In 1874, the Legislature of Kentucky had his remains disinterred and brought to Frankfort, where they were reinterred in the State Cemetery with military honors. His remains were laid to rest among those of his comrades in arms at the foot of the great monument erected to their memory and immortalized by the poem he wrote in their honor. O’Hara was distinguished as a soldier in the Mexican War and in the Civil War. He was also distinguished in the filibustering expedition which Lopez led into Cuba. His fame, however, will rest more enduringly on the few poems that he wrote. Only two of his poems seem to have been preserved, one of which is given below.

The other poem was “The Old Pioneer,” an elegy of Boone. The comrades in arms fought in the Mexican War. I include this bio here in full because its tone is consistent with the martial sentimentality [and southern jingoism] of the poem, which in truth I can scarcely stand to read, and because it uses the word filibuster in a meaning I didn’t know: “an adventurer who engages in a private military action in a foreign country.” I guess we have a number of filibusters in Iraq.

William Ward rounds out the portrait a bit in A Literary History of Kentucky. According to Ward, O’Hara taught Greek at St. Joseph’s College in Bardstown and worked as a journalist in Frankfort, Louisville, and Mobile, Alabama. Ward describes “Bivuoac of the Dead” as

…perhaps the most celebrated and often quoted martial elegy written in America…it has been read and recited in every quarter of the globe and its opening lines cut into commemorative military shafts whereever fallen soldiers are honored, including the gateway of the National Cemetery at Arlington. Written in 1847, it was published in the Kentucky Yeoman in 1850.

According to Wikipedia, where I “borrowed” the photo, “Bivuoac” was written in honor of the Second Kentucky Regiment officers who died in the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. The University of Tennessee Press has issued a biography, Theodore O’Hara: Poet-Soldier of the Old South.

The Bivuoac of the Dead

The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat
The soldier’s last tattoo!
No more on life’s parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few;
On Fame’s eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.

No rumor of the foe’s advance
Now swells upon the wind;
No troubled thought at midnight haunts
Of loved ones left behind;
No vision of the morrow’s strife
The warrior’s dream alarms;
No braying horn nor screaming fife
Al dawn shall call to arms.

Their shivered swords are red with rust,
Their plumed heads are bowed,
Their haughty banner, trailed in dust,
Is now their martial shroud-
And plenteous funeral tears have washed
The red stains from each brow,
And the proud forms in battle gashed,
Are free from anguish now.

The neighing troop, the flashing blade,
The bugle’s stirring blast,
The charge, the dreadful cannonade,
The din and shout are past-
Nor war’s wild note, nor glory’s peal,
Shall thrill with fierce delight
Those breasts that never more may feel
The rapture of the fight.

Like the fierce Northern hurricane
That sweeps his great plateau,
Flushed with the triumph yet to gain,
Came down the serried foe-
Who heard the thunder of the fray
Break o’er the field beneath,
Knew well the watchword of that day
Was victory or death.

Full many a norther’s breath has swept
O’er Augustura’s plain,
And long the pitying sky has wept
Above its moulder’d slain;
The raven’s scream or eagle’s flight,
Or shepherd’s pensive lay
Alone awakes each sullen height
That frowned o’er that dread fray.

Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground!
Ye must not slumber there,
Where stranger steps and tongues resound
Along the heedless air;
Your own proud land’s heroic soil
Should be your fitter grave;
She claims from War his richest spoil-
The ashes of her brave.

Thus, ‘neath their parent turf they rest,
Far from the gory field,
Borne to a Spartan mother’s breast
On many a bloody shield.
The sunshine of their native sky
Smiles sadly on them here,
And kindred eyes and hearts watch by
The hero’s sepulchre.

Rest on, embalmed and sainted dead!
Dear as the blood ye gave;
No impious footsteps here shall tread
The herbage of your grave;
Nor shall your glory be forgot
While Fame her record keeps,
Or Honor points the hallowed spot
Where Valor proudly sleeps.

Yon marble minstrel’s voiceful stone,
In deathless song shall tell,
When many a vanished age hath flown,
The story how ye fell;
Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter’s blight,
Nor time’s remorseless doom,
Can dim one ray of holy light
That gilds your glorious tomb.

— Theodore O’Hara from Kentucky Eloquence Past and Present: Library of Orations, After-Dinner Speeches, Popular and Classic Lectures, Addresses and Poetry, editor-in-chief Col Bennett H. Young

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