Idyllic Monologues

Beyond a bramble-choked lane, a white mansion sleeps beneath locust trees, and in its overgrown garden Margaret’s grave has gone green. The man who leads us there has a confession bound to one terrible night of the Civil War.

In Madison Julius Cawein’s Old and New World Verses, the opening poem, “The Brothers,” turns a ruined Southern home into the setting for a reckoning. As war tears through the countryside, the speaker and Margaret believe Hamilton, his brother, is dead; in time, they marry. Then a captured Confederate spy asks to see the speaker—and he recognizes the man as Hamilton. Love, fear, and guilt converge in a choice that cannot be undone. What happened when the brother came home?

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