Poems of Men and Events, Gapland Edition,
E.F. Bonaventure & Co., 1899

Book Preface states this publication contains new poems by George Alfred Townsend not previously published in 1875 Poems, Tales of the Chesapeake, or Poetical Addresses

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Poems of Men, page 4
Poems of Events, page 38
Palos, page 58
Traveler's Rest, page 78
Maryland Poems, page 111
South Mountain, page 133
Washington City Poems, page 156
Queen Christine, page 175
Bessie, page 208 (SEE BELOW)
War Correspondent's Memorial at Gapland, MD page 213 (SEE BELOW)
Delaware Poems, page 220
From Gapland, page 259

WAR CORRESPONDENT'S MEMORIAL (at Gapland, MD, 1896)

Arch aerial, view ethereal,
Sky and stars and moonlit cloud,
Harvest fields and golden cereal,
Rainbow on the mountain bowed;
Mountain ridges stepped like bridges,
O'er the rich campagna vale;
Storm which marches with lightning torches
Firing volleys of bullet hail;
Windstorm boreal, rainstorm oriel
Snow pictorial on knob and town -
All are revealed through our Memorial,
Grim as a cyclop staring down.

Born so rigid, stony and frigid, Moor and Roman it must be,
Long erected, a gate dissected
From some castle's feudality;
Or set in the passes, where saying masses,
Pilgrims, crusaders, kneeling them,
Gazed and trembled, with undissembled
Joy, in the sight of Jerusalem.
Vale of Catoctin, like jewels locked in
An azure casket, flash thy lights!
Like the Escorial, our Memorial
Guards them all from the mountain heights.

Yawning fortalice, thine the portal is
Freedom opened her pen,
When the valley so musically
Pealed with bugles of armed men:
Walls of mountain burst with a fountain,
Smitten from rock by our Moses,
Frowning height arched with the light,
Bloomed the Bastille into roses.
Prison and light, ruin and right,
Show in the gap, grim and lean;
Homely, manorial, our Memorial
Witnesses what it has seen.
Windows stand triple, each of them typal,
Each an evangel's page white;
One is Depiction, one is Description,
One is Photography's light.
These in aclivity, arch on activity,
Horse-shod the Centaur uprears;
Unicorn-towered, forest embowered,
Sun dial, sentry of years;
Letters amidst the arms, history o'er the farms,
Socketing moon and stars,
High and pictorial, our Memorial
Tells of the tellers of wars!

BESSIE (the wife of Gath)

Bless her heart! I see her shake
All the lawn weeds from her rake,
In her home she seems to take
Such a comfort, such a care,
As if these old mountain fields
Were her precious annual yields,
And her back their warrior shields,
Like the children she did bear.

Now the peach tree bough she strips,
Now her flower borders clips:
These are the same earnest lips,
Thirty years and three agone,
That to me in beauty came,
Fearing not my fiery flame,
Sinking in my name her name -
That dear lady on the lawn.

Diligence was all her art,
Open as the day her heart,
Nothing subtle, double, smart -
Now I know it, now I weep;
For her hair is growing grey,
And I feel some lonely day,
None will rake the spring-time hay,
Where she lowly lies asleep.

But no rust in her hair,
In her hands or anywhere;
Like some gold-piece lost by wear,
She has wasted grain by grain.
After her will live her fruit,
May they get her tireless foot!
There can be no dust nor soot
In the orbit of that brain.