So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

directly stating it), the pending action of this Time and Land we

swim in, with all their large con®icting ®uctuations of despair and

hope, the shiftings, masses, and the whirl and deafening din, (yet

over all, as by invisible hand, a de¤nite purpose and idea) with

unprecedented anguish of wounded and suffering, the beautiful

young men in wholesale death and agony, everything sometimes

as of blood color and dripping blood. The book is therefore un-

precedentedly sad (as these days are, are they not?), but it also has

the blast of the trumpet and the drum pounds and whirrs in it,

and then an undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love

threads its steady thread inside the chaos and is heard at every

lull and interstice thereof. Truly also, it has clear notes of faith

and triumph.^8

Armed combat has two discrete aspects—¤ghting and killing.^9 At the
outbreak of the Civil War, when Whitman was still living in New York
and the distant battles seemed glamorous and the scenes of killing were
far away, he was caught up in the romantic fervor at the moment when
most Northerners expected their forces to prevail after one or two deci-
sive skirmishes—an attitude that changed to bewilderment after the
Union armies suffered a series of military reverses. Whitman’s initial en-
thusiasm for the victory of the “Free States,” shadowed by some accom-
panying doubts, is expressed in an aborted verse, from which some lines
follow:

Welcome the storm—welcome the trial...

Come now we shall see what stuff you are made of Ship of

Libertad

Let others tremble and turn pale,—let them...

I welcome this menace—I welcome thee with joy.^10

Some Drum-Taps poems apparently had their genesis in these early days
of the war, when the poet was visiting hospitalized soldiers in New York
Hospital and other facilities. He perceived even then that the sufferings
and deaths of soldiers was a powerful poetic theme. “What a volume of
meaning, what a tragic poem in every one of these sick wards!” he ex-
claimed. “Yes, in every individual cot, with its little card-rack nailed at the
head.” And anticipating the way in which the wartime persona would

164 / “Come Sweet Death!”