The Photographic History

Ode at Magnolia Cemetery

Volume IX, Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray, 1911, pages 274–76

“Sleep sweetly in your humble graves” — sung at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, on Memorial Day, April 1867.

Timrod wrote the ode for the first decoration of the Confederate graves at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, and died the following year.

Cite as

Henry Timrod, “Ode at Magnolia Cemetery,” in The Photographic History of the Civil War, ed. Francis Trevelyan Miller, vol. 9, Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray (New York: Review of Reviews Co., 1911), 274–76.

The page in the scanned volumeThe whole volume at the Internet Archive

Published
1911
Volume
IX — Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray
Pages
274–76
Kind
poem
Author
Henry Timrod

Sung mi the occasion of decorating the graves of tin- Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, on Memorial Day, April, 1867.

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves.
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause:
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs.
Heboid! your sisters bring their tears,
.And these memorial blooms.

: I sed by permission of the 15. F. Johnson Publishing Company. Richmond, Virginia, publishers of the Memorial Edition of the "Poems of Henry Timrod. "

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Than when sonic cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies.
By mourning beauty crowned.
Henry Timrod.

The scan

What the scanning made of this page, and what it is in the printed original.

  • The ode is printed in two parts, with a plate of the sailors' burial ground at Hilton Head between them; that plate belongs to John Albee's poem on the preceding page and is not reproduced here.