A Poem for Memorial Day

Decoration Day

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this Field of Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

***

Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar,
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

***

But in this camp of Death
No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
No wound that bleeds and aches.

***

All is repose and peace,
Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
It is the Truce of God!

***

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.

***

Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.

About this poem

“Decoration Day,” a remembrance honoring the Civil War dead, was first published in our June 1882 issue. As our poetry editor David Barber explains, the piece predates the Memorial Day holiday as we know it:

The poem pays tribute to what was then a new form of civic observance: a day set aside to commemorate those who had perished in the Civil War, by placing flags and flowers on soldiers’ graves, a custom that gradually gave rise to our modern Memorial Day honoring all who give their lives in military service. Its first readers likely felt an elegiac pang all the more acutely: By the time the poem circulated in the June 1882 Atlantic, it would have been national news that Longfellow had died just a few weeks earlier at his home in Cambridge, at the age of 75.