Ode to the Confederate Dead, read by Allen Tate

“Tate wrote the poem in 1928. It wasn’t an ode at all, of course. It was a blind empty meditation on death. He was trying to find meaning but ran up against a blank slate. He stood at the gate of the cemetery and tried to connect” and couldn’t. (By the way, there’s an extraordinary YouTube video of Tate himself reciting the entire poem in his refined Southern brogue.)

In other words, there’s a mystery at the heart of every Civil War memorial, both the Northern ones and the Southern ones, and that mystery speaks across the ensuing decades as the nation moved into modernity. These symbols of war are actually symbols of profound grief. Why does my family save the official discharge letter of my great-great-grandfather, a captain in the Confederate Army, since it’s just a hastily scribbled scrap of paper allowing him to take his horse back to Texas? Because it’s something formal and understandable, unlike the messy horror of the war itself.

The Civil War was the worst event in our history. The reason most Civil War monuments are so beautiful is that they’re covering up massacres and maimings and hatreds so intense that you can’ t make sense of them. We should keep these whited sepulchers. They do mean something. If we’re still in the process of figuring out what they mean, that doesn.t mean we should cart them off to the junkyard, like small-town librarians who take Huckleberry Finn off the shelves because Mark Twain used the N-word.”

Joe Bob Briggs





Video recorded in the Confederate section of Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia