life's theater, theater... here's a stentorian, dramaturgical old poem:

         An Old Question


  
 
         The war knew many theaters,
 McClellan vacillating at the Potomac,
 Comic-opera Burnside driving the farmboys
 Up the hill again and again
 Like clockwork into blood and grass,
 Serious Lee striking northward
 Only to meet the Minnesota Regiment
 And touch the veritable turning-point...

  
         And then there was Lincoln,
 Best actor of them all, plain-spoken
 Yet with heart and mind in tune
 For the mastery of gruesome Mars;
 Waiting for the war on the field
 To end at last, his duty done –
 And then let destiny unfold its hand
 With an off-stage crown, a funeral train.

  
         These lights cast on the boards,
 Amateur actors traveling up from home –
 Were the lines learnt well enough,
 The plowing properly done that spring?
 And the coffin crossing the prairie,
 The wafer sun among the lilacs,
 The warbling voice – sacrifice enough,
 And memory, for the conflagration?