“Shiloh: A Requiem”

The battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburgh Landing, is thoroughly documented in the Rebellion Record, Volume IV, Doc. 356-417. Melville probably skimmed, even if he did not read closely, all of the Shiloh accounts. The work which he relied on in writing “Shiloh” was the Cincinnati Gazette narrative (Doc. 385-400). From this account he took details of the weather and the church, “the log-built one,” and a line that sets the mood for the entire poem.
The placid atmosphere evoked by the opening lines,

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh,

clashes with the picture of injured men suffering silently in the cool night rain and the companion detail of “The church so lone, the log-built one.” The scene concludes with a second reference to the skimming swallows: “While over them the swallows skim,/And all is hushed at Shiloh.” The total effect is an impression of profound peace and silence after a period of intense battle—exactly the effect striven for by Melville, as is indicated by the poem’s subtitle, “A Requiem.” This dominant mood is the direct result of Melville’s reading of the following passage from the Gazette:

Placing these in position, and arranging his brigades for support, took him [Gen. Lew Wallace] till one o’clock in the morning. Then his wearied men lay down to snatch a few hours of sleep before entering into the valley of the Shadow of Death on the morrow. By nine o’clock all was hushed near the landing. The host of combatants that three hours before had been deep in the work of human destruction had all sunk silently to the earth, “the wearied to sleep, the wounded to die.” The stars looked out upon the scene, and all breathed the natural quiet and calm of a Sabbath evening (Doc. 195).

The lines “Over the field where April rain/Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain” have their source in the following Gazette passage:

A heavy thunderstorm had come up about midnight, and though we were all shivering over the ducking, the surgeons assured us that a better thing could not have happened. The ground, they said, was covered with wounded not yet found, or whom we were unable to bring from the field. The moisture would to some extent, cool the burning, parching thirst, which is one of the chief terrors of lying wounded and helpless on the battle-field, and the falling water was the best dressing for the wounds (Doc. 396).

Although the log church is mentioned in several reports, it is likely that Melville got his knowledge of “ . . . the church of Shiloh/The church so lone, the log-built one,” from the following mention of it in the Gazette: “Gen. Sherman’s camps, to the right of the little log-cabin called Shiloh church, fronted on a descending slope” (Doc. 387).