What we now call Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day after the custom of decorating the graves of soldiers who had fought in the Civil War. The name has changed, but the honorable custom continues.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1882 poem “Decoration Day” shows us why Longfellow was the most popular poet of nineteenth-century America. Why not share it with your homeschool students on this Decoration Day weekend.
Decoration Day
Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this Field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar,
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.But in this camp of Death
No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
No wound that bleeds and aches.All is repose and peace,
Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
It is the Truce of God!Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
โก Little lessons: Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” is not only a beautiful poem, it’s also a fine example you can use to teach your students about extended metaphors in literature. The poem draws an imaginative comparison between soldiers sleeping on their battlefield campgrounds at night, and the rows of graves in the burial ground covered by “tents” of green grass. See how many specific comparisons or contrasts you and your students can identify (the contrast between the trampled ground of the battlefield and the untrampled ground of the burying field; the comparison between the sentinel guards on the battlefield and all of us as guardians of memory on the burying field; and so on).
![[Decoration Day at Arlington National Cemetery]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/FMA_grave-1.jpg)
What literary or historical discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately?