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“Malvern Hill”
Battle of Malvern Hill, Virginia, July 1, 1862—The Rebels repulsed by the Union artillery
The mood of “Malvern Hill” is dominated by the depiction of the elms. The poem opens with the line “Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill” and closes with the stanza:
We elms of Malvern Hill
Remember every thing;
But sap the twig will fill;
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in spring.
It is possible that this poem was suggested to Melville by a passage in the Grenada Appeal describing the battle at Malvern Hill and the surrounding countryside (Rebellion Record, V, Doc. 265-266). The following passage should be compared with Melville’s poem:
The house at Malvern Hill is a quaint old structure . . . . A fine grove of ancient elms embowers the lawn in a grateful shade, affording numberless vistas of far-off wheat-fields and little gleaming brooks of water, with the dark blue fringe of the primitive pines on the horizon. It seemed a bitter satire on the wickedness of man, this peaceful, serene, harmonious aspect of nature, and I turned from the joyous and quiet landscape to the mutilated victims around me with something like a malediction upon Seward and Lincoln and their participants in the crime of bringing on this accursed war (Doc. 266).
None of the other accounts of Malvern Hill in the Rebellion Record mention the elms.
