In the Prison Pen

By Herman Melville
(1864)
Listless he eyes the palisades
     And sentries in the glare;
’Tis barren as a pelican-beach—
     But his world is ended there.
 
Nothing to do; and vacant hands
     Bring on the idiot-pain;
He tries to think—to recollect,
     But the blur is on his brain.
 
Around him swarm the plaining ghosts
     Like those on Virgil’s shore—
A wilderness of faces dim,
     And pale ones gashed and hoar.
 
A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;
     He totters to his lair—
A den that sick hands dug in earth
     Ere famine wasted there,
 
Or, dropping in his place, he swoons,
     Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead—
      Dead in his meagerness.

Source: “Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry, edited by Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005)