Summary
On a cloudy day, as swallows fly closely overhead, wounded and dying soldiers lay stretched out on a field. They are part of the aftermath of one of the Civil War's bloodiest conflicts. This moment is a pause that follows the initial battle. The speaker leaves the soldiers unnamed and anonymous, only nothing their suffering. As it begins to rain, the soldiers feel some momentary relief. They see a small church nearby.
Analysis
"Shiloh: A Requiem" is, as its title implies, an essentially elegiac poem. Herman Melville makes a series of choices to deemphasize the traditional themes of a war poem—battle and personal glory—to offer a more haunting image of the cost of conflict. Similarly, his choice of stark imagery and negation of individuality gives the poem a subdued and tragic mood. Melville's invocation of the natural world has a similar effect, offering some small relief and outer perspective to the plight of the wounded soldiers. The straight simplicity of the imagery also serves these thematic ends. They reinforce the setting and give clarity to the generalized suffering of the left-behind masses.
At the onset, there is a zooming-in effect. Melville chooses to begin with an image of swallows flying close to the field, "skimming lightly, wheeling still," implying a graceful motion. The visual imagery gets closer and closer, moving from "clouded days" all the way down to "the forest-field." The plain repetition of the word "field" in lines 3, 4, and 5 makes the grounding of the setting clear. It is worth noting that this first stanza is devoid of human interaction and is basically a landscape. As "April rain" comes down, we see a first glimpse of the soldiers, the "parched ones stretched in pain" who are "solaced" by the water. Beginning outside of the soldiers and then arriving at them as trapped figures, reframes the poem. The swallows exist above the fray of human conflict, untethered observers of the struggle.
Melville makes another distinctive choice in the scene; he avoids the actual scene of the battle. The reader is given no access to any of the "Sunday fight" in the text of the poem. By avoiding the iconography of rifles and sabres, Melville resets the reader's expectations for what is to follow. This is particularly notable given the fact that Shiloh was a major victory for the Union. There is no triumph in this "pause."
