ARM’D year! year of the struggle!

No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year!

Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas
piano;

But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing,
carrying a rifle on your shoulder,

With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands–with a knife in
the belt at your side,

As I heard you shouting loud–your sonorous voice ringing across the
continent;

Your masculine voice, O year, as rising amid the great cities,

Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you, as one of the workmen, the
dwellers in Manhattan;

Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and
Indiana,

Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait, and descending the
Alleghanies;

Or down from the great lakes, or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along
the Ohio river;

Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at
Chattanooga on the mountain top,

Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs, clothed in blue, bearing
weapons, robust year;

Heard your determin’d voice, launch’d forth again and again;

Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp’d cannon,

I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.