Today’s Poem: The Men Behind the Guns

Memorial Day verses for those who do the work of war

Allyn Cox, Naval Gun Crew in the Spanish-American War, frieze in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (Architect of the Capitol)

John Jerome Rooney (1866–1934) was once prominent enough to be included among the eighty-eight poets in the 1922 A Wreath for Edwin Markham: Tributes from the Poets of America on His Seventieth Birthday, alongside the likes of Faith Baldwin, E.A. Robinson, and Lew Sarett. Search hard enough, and you’ll find Rooney in such dusty corners as Joyce Kilmer’s 1917 Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets and Brander Matthews’s 1922 Poems of American Patriotism.

There’s a temptation, perhaps, to mock Rooney — Among the top eighty-eight poets in a minor American generation! — and perhaps he deserves the scorn. A lawyer and judge in New York’s Court of Claims, a Tammany Hall political fixer and beneficiary of the rise of Irish immigrants to power in New York City, Rooney just wasn’t that good at poetry: something more than an amateur (with his 1898 collection The M…