In the expansive realm of Victorian poetry, where the grandeur of empire often overshadowed the quiet struggles of those who sustained it, Rudyard Kipling emerges as a singular force, a bard who lent his pen to the overlooked voices of the common soldier with unmatched authenticity and vigor. "Troopin'," one of his most stirring contributions to the Barrack-Room Ballads, exemplifies this gift, immersing the reader in the jubilant yet hard-won relief of British troops concluding their service in India and setting sail for home. Kipling's work here pulses with life, transforming the abstract machinery of imperial duty into a visceral, human drama that celebrates resilience while never shying from the costs of conquest. One cannot help but feel a surge of enthusiasm for poetry's enduring power when encountering such a piece, for it does more than recount events—it resurrects the heartbeat of an era, the stomp of boots on dusty paths, the ache of separation, and the roar of homeward cheers. Through its unfiltered lens, "Troopin'" captures the emotional whirlwind of departure, blending triumph with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy, and in doing so, it affirms poetry's unique capacity to bridge historical distance and touch the universal longings of the human spirit.

To fully appreciate "Troopin'," one must first situate it within the intricate historical and cultural fabric of late-nineteenth-century British imperialism. The poem arises from the zenith of the British Raj in India, a period when the empire's military apparatus required constant replenishment and rotation to maintain control over vast territories. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British government committed to stationing a substantial force of regular troops—roughly sixty-five to seventy-five thousand strong—alongside the Indian Army, ensuring loyalty and readiness against frontier threats and internal unrest. Service terms for enlisted men typically spanned six years in India, after which "time-expired" soldiers, as they were officially termed, earned their release and passage home. This system, while pragmatic, imposed immense physical and psychological burdens: exposure to tropical diseases, grueling marches across unforgiving terrain, and the psychological toll of isolation from family and homeland. The Khyber Hills, referenced pointedly in the poem, evoke the volatile northwest frontier, scene of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), where British forces had clashed with Afghan tribes in bloody campaigns that underscored the empire's precarious hold on its borders.

Central to the soldiers' ordeal—and to the poem's narrative—was the arduous logistics of repatriation. The British authorities commissioned a fleet of purpose-built steam troopships, operated by the Royal Navy, to ferry battalions and their families between England and India. Vessels such as the Malabar and its consort, the Jumner (a phonetic rendering of the Jumna), were engineered to transport up to twelve hundred personnel each, complete with families and equipment, on voyages that could last weeks amid cramped, coaling stops and unpredictable seas. These ships symbolized both the empire's engineering prowess and its human engine: soldiers in thin Indian cotton kits, ill-prepared for England's damp chill, disembarking at ports like Portsmouth into rain and uncertainty, often facing immediate risks of pneumonia from the abrupt climate shift. Culturally, this era revered the empire as a civilizing mission, yet it simultaneously marginalized the enlisted ranks—the "Tommies"—who bore the brunt of its enforcement. Working-class recruits, drawn from Britain's industrial slums, were lionized in patriotic rhetoric but derided in civilian society as rough, expendable figures. Kipling's poem counters this by elevating their perspective, drawing on the vibrant tradition of music-hall ballads and folk songs that had long given rhythmic expression to sailors and soldiers. In an age of jingoistic fervor, "Troopin'" offers a counterpoint: not blind glorification, but a gritty, affectionate tribute to the men who "earned their pay" in the shadows of imperial glory.

This historical backdrop intersects profoundly with Kipling's own biography, enriching the poem's authenticity and emotional depth. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling spent his early childhood in India, an experience that indelibly shaped his worldview and infused his writing with an insider's intimacy. Sent back to England for schooling at age five—a common practice among Anglo-Indian families—he endured the harsh discipline of a foster home before returning to India at seventeen as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. There, amid the bustling cantonments and frontier outposts, he mingled with officers and enlisted men alike, absorbing their slang, songs, and stories. Though poor eyesight barred him from military service, Kipling developed a deep empathy for the ordinary soldier, whom he saw as the unsung backbone of empire. His journalism and early verses reflect this bond, portraying the Tommy not as a faceless cog but as a figure of wry humor, stoic endurance, and quiet loyalty. In "Troopin'," this biographical lens manifests as a profound respect for the soldiers' vernacular worldview, allowing Kipling to channel their collective voice without condescension. It is this personal connection that lends the poem its philosophical weight: an implicit meditation on duty's demands, where individual aspirations clash with the impersonal cycles of state power. Kipling's perspective echoes broader Victorian debates on empire—celebratory yet shadowed by awareness of its human toll—positioning "Troopin'" as a nuanced artifact that humanizes the imperial project while subtly questioning its relentless machinery.

Turning to the literary craft that animates "Troopin'," Kipling employs a suite of devices that render the soldiers' experience immediate and immersive, fostering an emotional resonance that transcends mere description. Foremost is the masterful use of vernacular dialect, with its phonetic spellings—" 'Ere's," "be'ind," " 'ome," "yit," and "Lunnon"—that capture the Cockney-inflected speech of the British working-class recruit. This technique does not caricature but authenticates, drawing readers into the intimate circle of barrack-room conversation and imbuing the narrative with oral vitality, as if the poem itself were being chanted aboard a heaving troopship. Repetition serves as a rhythmic heartbeat, with phrases like "Troopin', troopin'" and "We're goin' 'ome" echoing like marching feet or a sea shanty's refrain, evoking the monotonous yet purposeful cadence of military life and the mounting excitement of departure. Sensory imagery abounds, painting vivid tableaux: the ship's coaling up in harbor, the weary vigil on Khyber hills, the cold wet rain at Portsmouth wharf, and the simple allure of "English women an' a quart of English beer." These details ground the abstract in the tangible, allowing readers to feel the contrast between India's oppressive heat and England's raw dampness, or the soldier's threadbare cotton kit against the promise of home comforts.

Irony and gallows humor further sharpen the poem's edge, infusing it with a philosophical realism that tempers jubilation. The casual directive to "leave the dead be'ind us, for they cannot come away" confronts mortality with unflinching matter-of-factness, acknowledging the empire's human ledger without sentimentality. Similarly, the jest about pneumonia—"They'll kill us of pneumonia—for that's their little way"—mocks bureaucratic indifference while underscoring the soldiers' defiant resilience. Colloquial tenderness emerges in the address to "My lovely Mary-Ann," where the promise of marriage "on a fourp'ny bit" blends romantic aspiration with pragmatic humility, humanizing the speaker amid the grand sweep of imperial return. Call-and-response elements, reminiscent of communal folk traditions, build a sense of shared camaraderie, transforming individual relief into collective catharsis. Through these devices, Kipling achieves a layered texture: the poem sings with energy and accessibility, yet beneath lies a sophisticated exploration of transience, where joy coexists with the knowledge that the "old campaign" endures for others. Such artistry elevates "Troopin'" beyond balladry into a profound literary achievement, one that invites repeated engagement and rewards close attention with ever-deeper emotional layers.

At the heart of "Troopin'" lie themes that probe the complexities of imperial service, homecoming, and human endurance, themes that resonate with philosophical profundity while remaining firmly rooted in the soldiers' lived reality. Foremost is the motif of homecoming as both liberation and bittersweet rupture. The repeated insistence on "goin' 'ome" pulses with triumphant relief, yet it is tempered by the recognition of what must be abandoned—the dead on distant hills, the regiment left behind, the endless rotation of duty. This creates a poignant tension: freedom arrives, but only as the wheel of empire turns, with "new draf's pourin' in" to replace the veterans. The cycle underscores a philosophical fatalism akin to Sisyphus's eternal labor, where individual triumph yields to institutional perpetuity, yet the soldiers' cheer defies despair through sheer vitality. Camaraderie emerges as a sustaining force, forged in shared hardship and expressed in toasts to "English women" and the Colonel's reluctant stay. Kipling portrays this brotherhood not as abstract loyalty but as a pragmatic, earthy bond that makes the unbearable endurable—a theme that anticipates existentialist reflections on solidarity amid absurdity.

The human cost of empire threads subtly yet insistently through the verse, manifesting in references to disease, frontier vigils, and the casual acceptance of loss. Here, "Troopin'" engages philosophically with the ethics of imperialism: it neither condemns nor glorifies but humanizes the participants, revealing how ordinary men navigate moral ambiguities through humor and stoicism. The tender domestic vision of Mary-Ann contrasts sharply with the martial grind, highlighting themes of longing and renewal—dreams of civilian life that persist despite the empire's claims. In this, the poem echoes broader literary explorations of duty versus desire, from Homer's Odysseus yearning for Ithaca to modern meditations on war's aftermath. Resilience shines as the unifying thread: damn the chills, the fever, the rain—the men press on with "Whoop!" and cheer. This stoic joy carries philosophical weight, suggesting that meaning arises not from grand ideologies but from the small affirmations of survival and return. Collectively, these themes weave a tapestry of empire's dual legacy: its capacity to inspire loyalty and extract sacrifice, while affirming the indomitable spirit that outlasts both.

The emotional impact of "Troopin'" is immediate and profound, stirring a spectrum of responses that linger long after the final cheer fades. Readers experience an infectious exuberance in the soldiers' release, a vicarious thrill that mirrors the poem's rhythmic surge and communal refrains. Yet beneath this lies a quiet melancholy—the awareness of lives curtailed, bonds severed by distance and death—that tempers celebration with empathy. Kipling's genius lies in balancing these poles, evoking not pity but admiration for the men's uncomplaining fortitude. One feels the poem's resonance as a living artifact: it humanizes history, allowing contemporary audiences to empathize with Victorian soldiers whose voices history might otherwise silence. This emotional depth ensures "Troopin'" transcends its era, speaking to anyone who has known separation, duty's weight, or the sweet ache of homeward longing. Poetry's magic here is evident in how it forges connection across time, turning abstract imperial narratives into intimate, heart-stirring encounters.

Comparatively, "Troopin'" illuminates broader patterns in Kipling's oeuvre and war literature at large. Within the Barrack-Room Ballads, it complements pieces like "Mandalay," which romanticizes eastern exile, or "Tommy," which decries civilian scorn for the soldier, by shifting focus to the redemptive arc of return. Where "Danny Deever" confronts execution's grim finality, "Troopin'" offers cathartic release, yet both underscore the regiment's inexorable demands. Philosophically, it prefigures the disillusionment of First World War poets such as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, who would inherit Kipling's soldier-centric lens but infuse it with horror rather than hardy cheer. Kipling's pre-war optimism—rooted in imperial confidence—contrasts with their shattered ideals, yet both traditions affirm poetry's role in voicing the voiceless. In a wider philosophical frame, the poem invites reflection on Hannah Arendt's "banality of empire" or Camus's absurd hero: men who revolt not through rebellion but through defiant persistence and small acts of humanity. Such comparisons enrich our understanding, revealing "Troopin'" as a bridge between Victorian balladry and modernist introspection.

Ultimately, "Troopin'" endures as a testament to poetry's transformative power, its ability to distill history's grand currents into the vivid pulse of individual lives. Kipling invites us to cheer alongside those weary yet triumphant men, to savor the beer and the promise of home, even as we ponder the cycles that bind us all. In an age still grappling with legacies of power and sacrifice, this poem reminds us why verse matters: it awakens empathy, preserves memory, and celebrates the resilient human spirit with unflagging enthusiasm. To read "Troopin'" is to march in step with history's foot soldiers—and to emerge moved, enlightened, and profoundly grateful for poetry's enduring song.

Nora Hopper Chesson’s “Thor Asleep” is a poem of mythic emergency. It begins with a question addressed to the greatest defender in the Norse divine order: where is Thor while “the men go down to the war”? That question immediately transforms the familiar thunder-god into a figure of troubling absence. Thor is traditionally defined by motion, force, and resistance: he travels, strikes, contests giants, safeguards the divine community, and protects the human world against hostile powers. Chesson imagines the unthinkable opposite. The hammer is laid aside, the giant-slayer sleeps, and warfare continues below him without his intervention. The result is not simply a picturesque use of Scandinavian legend. It is an intense meditation on cultural exhaustion, the failure of inherited heroic ideals, the grief of war, and the difficult possibility that song might awaken what force itself has forgotten.

Written at the turn of the twentieth century, when British and Irish literary culture was deeply engaged with folklore, legend, medievalism, and national origins, the poem belongs to a broad revivalist atmosphere. Norse literature had become newly available and newly prestigious in the nineteenth century through translations, antiquarian study, retellings of the Eddas and sagas, and the imaginative work of poets and artists. The appeal of the Norse world was substantial: it seemed stark, elemental, tragic, and less softened by later religious or courtly traditions than classical mythology. Its gods were not serene Olympians but figures who knew fear, loss, fate, and eventual destruction. For writers dissatisfied with the certainties of modern progress, the old northern myths offered an idiom for grandeur shadowed by catastrophe.

Chesson was closely associated with the late Victorian and fin-de-siècle taste for Celtic and northern myth, though her imaginative relation to these materials is more significant than any narrow national classification. Her poetry often seeks a lyrical, incantatory music capable of making legendary time feel emotionally immediate. In “Thor Asleep,” she does not offer a scholarly reconstruction of pagan Scandinavia. Rather, she creates a visionary composite from Eddic mythology, saga material, revivalist fantasy, and the emotional language of her own era. The poem’s Norse world is recognizably ancient, but it speaks in the accents of modern cultural anxiety. The gods have not vanished entirely; more painfully, they remain present but inactive. Their sleep is a condition of suspended power.

The opening invocation establishes this paradox with remarkable economy. Thor is named “Lord of the Plains of Trembling” and “Master of Bonds-men,” titles that enlarge him into a cosmic authority while also recalling his special association with ordinary human beings. In Norse tradition Thor is, more than Odin, a god of practical protection: a defender against giants and a guardian of Midgard, the human realm. The phrase “men go down to the war” therefore has particular force. Human beings descend into suffering while their protector is withdrawn. “Go down” suggests not only military movement but a movement toward death, burial, or moral darkness. Chesson’s question does not assume that war is glorious. Her phrasing makes it a grim destination, an underworldly descent undertaken by the vulnerable.

Thor’s weapons are also made strangely domestic and vulnerable. The poem asks whether “the Giants’ Bane” has been laid by, its battles finished. “Giants’ Bane” is an evocative epithet for Mjolnir, here spelled “Miolnir,” Thor’s hammer and the emblem of his power to resist chaos. In traditional myth, Thor’s conflict with giants is never merely personal; giants often embody destructive natural forces, primal antagonism, and the threat of disorder to the ordered world of gods and humans. If the hammer rests, the boundary between protection and danger is no longer secure. Yet Chesson’s imagination does not merely celebrate violence. The hammer is needed because the world has become endangered, not because battle is inherently desirable. The poem’s longing for Thor’s return arises from the recognition that peace without vigilance may be only another name for helplessness.

The first imagined explanation for Thor’s sleep is love. Perhaps he sits beside Sif while she plays her harp and sings “a drowsy rhyme of woes and wars that were.” This scene is one of the poem’s most subtle inventions. Sif, known in Norse myth as Thor’s wife and associated above all with her shining golden hair, is not conventionally remembered as a harpist. Chesson gives her music, and in doing so makes her a figure for lyric art itself. Her song is beautiful, tender, and historically conscious; it remembers suffering without summoning action. It turns wars into “wars that were,” completed events safely absorbed into art. There is a real temptation in this vision. To sit beside a beloved person and listen to music after violence is not contemptible. It represents the human desire for rest, intimacy, and consolation. But the poem asks whether such consolation has become forgetfulness. Have “swords and slings” become obsolete not because justice has prevailed, but because the defenders have been enchanted into passivity?

Chesson refuses to make Sif a simple temptress or an emblem of domestic softness. The next movement corrects that possibility immediately: “she is a God’s own daughter, and the wild blood’s in her, too.” The phrase “wild blood” gives Sif a latent kinship with the martial and elemental world from which Thor has retreated. She has watched “the young lives spilling,” a startlingly physical image that strips warfare of abstraction. Lives do not merely end; they spill, as blood spills. The image is especially powerful because it joins vitality and waste: the young are figured as something precious poured irretrievably onto the ground. Sif has also “trodden them down like dew,” an image at once delicate and brutal. Dew is transient, luminous, and easily crushed beneath a foot. Chesson’s language suggests that war renders youth as fragile and disposable as morning moisture on grass.

The question of whether Sif longs for “the seagull’s song, and the ships in the midsea blue” enlarges her beyond the enclosed domestic scene. Seagulls and ships evoke travel, raiding, migration, departure, and the maritime world of the northern imagination. They also offer a sharp contrast to the interior quiet of harp music. Sif is not merely asked to restore Thor to battle; she is asked to remember the unsettled horizons of the world, the calls that come from beyond the safety of home. The sea in Chesson’s poetry is a space of beauty, danger, and historical movement. This maritime image helps prevent the poem from becoming a rigid opposition between feminine music and masculine action. Sif’s song is capable of drowsiness, but she herself is capable of awakening. Indeed, the poem ultimately entrusts the awakening to her voice.

The central command, “Awake, O Sif, arise, O Sif, and bid thy lord up-stand,” is deliberately surprising. Thor, the thunderer, must be roused by Sif. The poem thus shifts agency toward the figure initially imagined as the keeper of peace and song. She is instructed to gird Thor with his belt and place Mjolnir in his hand, participating directly in the restoration of divine strength. Thor’s famous belt, which increases his might, becomes an emblem of recovered readiness, while the act of putting the hammer into his hand is almost ceremonial. Chesson stages not an impulsive rush into violence but a re-consecration of responsibility. The aim is explicitly political and ethical: Thor must rise “for Odin’s right and the sake of Odin’s land.” “Right” here means both lawful claim and moral justice. The desired action is defensive, restorative, and communal rather than merely aggressive.

Yet the poem’s appeal to Odin is darkened by a pervasive sense that the old divine order has already suffered irreversible loss. Bragi, god of poetry and eloquence, sleeps while wild bees hum above him. The detail is exquisite: bees ordinarily suggest fertility, summer, communal industry, and the ceaseless workings of nature. Here their humming becomes an accompaniment to divine unconsciousness. Nature continues, but sacred song does not. Frigga listens at her loom “for steps that never come,” an image of maternal waiting that alludes especially to the loss of Balder, her beloved son. In Norse myth Balder’s death is one of the great traumas of the gods’ history, and Frigg’s grief cannot prevent it. The loom, traditionally associated with women’s labor and with the weaving of fate, makes her waiting even more poignant. She continues the work of time while listening for a restoration she cannot command.

The poem reaches one of its bleakest formulations in the declaration that “an ended story is Odin’s glory, and the mouth of Mimir’s dumb.” Odin’s glory is a story that has ended: heroic memory survives, but the living source of authority has become narrative. This is a remarkably self-conscious statement for a mythological poem. Chesson knows that these gods exist for her readers as inherited stories, and she turns that fact into the subject of her art. Odin, seeker of wisdom, sacrifice, and knowledge, is reduced to a concluded tale; Mimir, the guardian of profound counsel whose head Odin consults in Norse tradition, is silent. Wisdom has not merely become difficult to hear. Its very mouth is dumb. The line evokes the fin-de-siècle fear that cultural inheritance may become ornamental, inert, and incapable of guiding present action.

At the same time, the poem refuses to accept silence as final. Its rhetoric becomes increasingly incantatory through repetition, imperative verbs, and accumulating clauses. “Up, Thor”; “up, Sif”; “Sing, Sif”: these commands create a verbal pressure designed to counter sleep. The poem performs the action it requests. It is itself a song addressed to dormant gods, and its repeated appeals suggest that poetry may not be passive recollection but an active force of invocation. The transition from Sif’s earlier “drowsy rhyme” to the urgent command that she sing until heroes hear her is crucial. Art has two possible functions. It may make the past pleasantly remote, soothing listeners into inaction; or it may preserve memory so intensely that memory becomes a summons. Chesson’s poem passionately chooses the second possibility.

The inclusion of Sigurd and Brynhild broadens the poem’s mythological field beyond the gods of Asgard into the heroic world of the Volsung tradition. Sigurd, dragon-slayer and tragic hero, is imagined asleep beside Brynhild, but the speaker permits them their rest: “let sleep be his and hers.” This exception is telling. Not every sleeper must awaken. Sigurd and Brynhild belong to a completed human tragedy, bound to desire, betrayal, and death. Their sleep is private, elegiac, perhaps earned. Thor’s sleep, by contrast, is a public failure because his task is ongoing. The distinction clarifies the poem’s ethical structure. It does not demand endless activity from all beings, nor does it deny the claims of love, grief, or repose. It insists only that those charged with protecting the living cannot abandon their office while danger persists.

“Open tho’ late is Valhall gate” introduces another powerful image of delayed renewal. Valhall, the hall of slain warriors, exists in Norse mythology as the gathering place of those who will fight beside Odin at Ragnarok, the final destruction and transformation of the cosmos. Chesson’s reference to its gate evokes the possibility that heroic forces may still be summoned, even late in the hour. The phrase “the sleeping fire it stirs” gives Valhall a latent warmth beneath apparent closure. Fire here is not only martial energy but the elemental contrary to the poem’s recurring coldness. The poem moves from sleep toward awakening, from silence toward song, from a frozen world toward a fire that may revive it. These transformations are less a simple prediction of victory than a struggle against paralysis.

The final invocations gather the poem’s mythic figures into an extraordinary vision of collective return. Sif must sing until heroes rise and go northward, until the Warder of Bifrost wakes, and until Balder wakes “below.” The Warder is Heimdall, guardian of the rainbow bridge between the human and divine worlds. His awakening implies that communication between realms, or between present need and sacred order, may be restored. Balder’s awakening from Hel is even more momentous. In the mythic future after Ragnarok, Balder returns from the realm of the dead, becoming a figure of renewal after cosmic devastation. Chesson draws upon that eschatological hope, but she makes it emotionally immediate through the image of sunrise breaking “the frozen heart of the snow.” Snow possesses a heart in this phrasing: winter is not merely a landscape but a condition of inward numbness. Sunrise breaks it open.

The appeal for Hel’s door to open and for Frigga’s watch to end intensifies the poem’s maternal grief. A mother’s vigil is among the most intimate forms of waiting, and Chesson places it within a cosmological drama. Balder’s return would restore not only a divine prince but the possibility that mourning may finally cease. The final image, in which Glasir rings with the steps of Tyr and Thor, turns sound itself into evidence of resurrection. Glasir, the shining grove associated with the divine world, is imagined as resonant beneath the feet of returning gods. Tyr, a god of courage, law, and sacrificial commitment, joins Thor in this closing movement, reinforcing the poem’s insistence that force must be allied with principle. The desired awakening is not simply the return of power. It is the return of an ethical order in which courage, protection, wisdom, poetry, and communal memory can once more answer one another.

In its historical setting, “Thor Asleep” can be read as responding to the pressures of an age preoccupied with imperial warfare, social change, religious uncertainty, and the apparent decline of stable cultural ideals. The poem does not attach its “war” to a particular named conflict, and that reticence is important. Myth gives Chesson a language in which to explore war’s recurring human cost without reducing the poem to topical commentary. Her “young lives spilling” has the moral force of an anti-romantic image even as the poem calls for heroic awakening. This tension is central to its achievement. Chesson does not sentimentalize battle, but neither does she believe that peace can be secured by a beautiful refusal to confront violence. Her poem asks what happens when a culture’s protective energies fall asleep and its stories become disconnected from present responsibility.

Comparisons with other revivalist writers illuminate Chesson’s distinctive method. William Morris’s engagements with the Volsung story seek to recover the large, grave movement of saga narrative and heroic destiny; Chesson, by contrast, compresses a vast mythological inheritance into lyric address. Matthew Arnold’s treatment of Balder similarly finds in Norse material a language for loss and spiritual crisis, but Chesson’s poem is more incantatory and more committed to the possibility of reanimation. One may also hear affinities with W. B. Yeats and other writers of the Celtic Revival, for whom ancestral legend was never merely antiquarian. Myth could become a means of asking whether a people might recover imaginative vitality through the very tales that seemed endangered by modernity. Chesson’s Sif embodies this faith in song with particular brilliance: she is not simply a musician within the poem; she is the image of poetry as cultural awakening.

The emotional power of “Thor Asleep” arises from its refusal to settle into either despair or triumph. Its world is full of sleep, silence, snow, closed gates, bereaved mothers, forgotten weapons, and stories that appear to have ended. But every image of stasis is answered by a possible movement: a hand may take up the hammer, a voice may sing, a gate may open, footsteps may sound, and sunrise may fracture the frost. The poem’s great achievement is to make this hope feel costly rather than easy. Awakening requires remembrance; it requires a willingness to hear grief without allowing grief to become mere numbness. In that sense, Chesson’s northern gods speak far beyond their legendary setting. “Thor Asleep” remains a stirring poem because it understands that communities, ideals, and even the imaginative powers by which people endure suffering can fall dormant. It also insists, with the ardor proper to poetry, that song may still call them back.