DEAD IN THE LONG, STRONG GRASS.
Joaquin Miller
ead! stark dead in the long, strong grass! - But he died with his sword in his hand.
- Who says it? who saw it? God saw it!
- And I knew him! St. George! he would draw it,
- Though they swooped down in mass
- Till they darkened the land!
- Then the seventeen wounds in his breast!
- Ah! these witness best.
- Dead! stark dead in the long, strong grass!
- Dead! and alone in the great dark land!
This is more interesting as history than as poetry. Contemporary readers will find it rather obscure but when it was written every reader knew exactly what Miller was referring to. When the regime of Napoleon III collapsed in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the Bonaparte family moved to England. The son, Napoleon, Prince Imperial, joined the British Army and went to Africa during the Anglo-Zulu war in 1879. There he was killed at the age of 23 in a skirmish. This closed any possibility of a resurrection of the Bonapartist cause. Just 20 years later in the second Boer War, at nearly the same age, Winston Churchill's adventures would garner the fame which formed the foundation for his political career. In both cases, pure luck played a major role. One died, the other lived. If it had been the other way around our history would be unimaginably different.