John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
Spread over it the bloodstained flag of his song,
For the sun to bleach, the wind and the birds to tear,
The snow to cover over with a pure fleece
And the New England cloud to work upon
With the grey absolution of its slow, most lilac-smelling rain,
Until there is nothing there
That ever knew a master or a slave
Or, brooding on the symbol of a wrong,
Threw down the irons in the field of peace.
John Brown is dead, he will not come again,
A stray ghost-walker with a ghostly gun.
John Brown's Body (1928) is an Americanepic poem written byStephen Vincent Benét. The poem's title references the radicalabolitionistJohn Brown, who raided thefederal armory atHarpers Ferry, Virginia in October 1859. He was captured and hanged later that year. Benét's poem covers the history of theAmerican Civil War.[2][3] It won thePulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929. It was written while Benét was living in Paris after receiving aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1926.[4]
The poem was performed onBroadway in 1953 in a staged dramatic reading starringTyrone Power,Judith Anderson, andRaymond Massey, and directed byCharles Laughton.
In 2002, the poem, transformed into a play, was performed inSan Quentin State Prison by prisoners.[5] The 2013 documentary filmJohn Brown's Body at San Quentin Prison recounts the story of the production of the play.[6][7]
In 2015, a recorded performance from 1953 was selected for inclusion in theLibrary of Congress's National Recording Registry for the recording's "cultural, artistic and/or historical significance to American society and the nation’s audio legacy".[8]
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