Looking into History

I.

Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eyeStand in a land subdued beyond belief.Belief might lend them life again. I tryLike orphaned Hamlet working up his grief

To see my spellbound fathers in these menWho, breathless in their amber atmosphere,Show but the postures men affected thenAnd the hermit faces of a finished year.

The guns and gear and all are strange untilBeyond the tents I glimpse a file of treesVerging a road that struggles up a hill.They’re sycamores.The long-abated breeze

Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the soundOf guns and a great forest in distress.Fathers, I know my cause, and we are boundBeyond that hill to fight at Wilderness.

II.

But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or thinkHow fire-cast shadows of the bankside treesRode on the back of Simois to sinkIn the wide waters. Reflect how history’s

Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mullsIts salvage of the world in shifty waves,Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hullsAnd yielding views of its confounded graves

To the new moon, the sun, or any eyeThat in its shallow shoreward version seesThe pebbles charging with a deathless cryAnd carageen memorials of trees.

III.

Now, old man of the sea,I start to understand:The will will find no stillnessBack in a stilled land.

The dead give no commandAnd shall not find their voiceTill they be mustered bySome present fatal choice.

Let me now rejoiceIn all impostures, takeThe shape of lion or leopard,Boar, or watery snake,

Or like the comber break,Yet in the end stand fastAnd by some fervent fraudFather the waiting past,

Resembling at the lastThe self-established treeThat draws all waters towardIts live formality.

Richard Wilbur, “Looking into History” from Collected Poems 1943-2004.