Herman Melville’s poetic elegy to those that died in horrific numbers during the Battle of Shiloh, a climactic early battle in the American Civil War, is a single sentence composed of 19 lines. That sentence begins with an image of a battlefield still clouded from the smoke of gunpowder. Low in the sky fly swallows, above the violent interruption of the normally peaceful lives in the forest and fields below.
The battle takes place on a rainy April weekend within sight of a nearby church in Shiloh. The suffering men on the battlefield welcome the rain as it quenches their thirst, and they gaze at the church constructed of logs. They seek out the solace of prayer and the promise of an afterlife. The soldiers dying on the field divided by uniforms are now united as men approaching that afterlife. They are not Union soldiers or Confederate soldiers or even Americans; they are simply men lying on the silent battlefield while swallows fly through the fog of war just above them.
