focus on the visage of a single dying soldier in several of the Drum-Taps
poems, he remarked that “the pale faces, the look of death, the appealing
eyes, come curiously of a sudden, plainly before me.”^11 However, Whit-
man’s ¤rst published war poems—what Jerome Loving calls his “recruit-
ment poems”^12 —are ¤lled with enthusiasm for the war. “Drum-Taps”
(later “First O Songs for a Prelude”), the opening poem in Drum-Taps,
displays a patriotic zeal bordering on jingoism for the fevered spirit of war
preparations and expresses his desire to become the war’s poet: “Manna-
hatta a-march—and O to sing it well!” he exclaims. The personi¤ed
¤gure of Mother Manhattan, who is tearfully sending her sons—“an
arm’d race advancing”—into battle symbolizes Whitman’s approval of the
proceedings, for these young recruits, he proclaims, are the harbingers of
America’s great democratic future, the “advancing” race of heroic Ameri-
can young men whose appearance he had forecast in “Song of the Broad-
Axe” and in his unpublished political tract “The Eighteenth Presidency!”
(1856). The poem catches the very lilt of martial music.
All the mutter of preparation, all the determin’d arming,
The hospital service, the lint, bandages and medicines,
The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in
earnest, no mere parade now;
War! an arm’d race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no
turning away;
War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm’d race is advancing
to welcome it.The enthusiastic but stilted “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” is an
elaborate effort to justify the war on patriotic-ideological grounds. It
is a sort of poetic cantata, with faint echoes of Schubert’s “Erl König,”
arranged for four voices—a child (representing the nation’s democratic
spirit); a father (the straw man representing those reluctant to enter into
the spirit of the war}; the Banner (the spirit of wartime patriotism); and
the Poet (Whitman’s alter ego), who announces his intention to become
the war’s bard, declaring that his is not the spirit that “lashes its own
body to terror and death, / But I am that which unseen comes and sings,
sings, sings.” In an act of virtual self-anointing, the Banner hails the Poet
as the spokesman of the forty million Americans: “O bard! in life and
death supreme, / We, even we, henceforth ®aunt out masterful, high up
“Come Sweet Death!” / 165