injured soldiers lay on the ground, illuminated by torchlights. That horrid
sight elicited his terse, embittered comment that “the wounded are get-
ting to be common, and people grow callous.” But he felt duty bound to
prevent the American public from becoming indifferent to the war’s ca-
sualties. Of the Battle of Chancellorsville he observed: “a thousand deeds
are done worthy to write never greater poems on—and still the woods on
¤re—still many not only scorch’d—too many unable to move are burn’d
to death.... Then the camp of the wounded—O heavens, what scene is
this? Is this indeed humanity—these butchers’ shambles?”^27 His intense
reactions to these gut-wrenching scenes of violence and carnage kept him
from achieving the objective distance from which he could translate these
events into disciplined poetry. As illustrated by a chaotic draft poem,
which verges on hysteria and preachment in describing scenes of violence
he had witnessed or about which he had been told, Whitman had not yet
developed the needed perspective from which to compose effective war
poetry or found an effective voice for his wartime persona. The manu-
script poem opens as a bloody battle is in progress and contains more
vivid details of actual ¤ghting than any published Drum-Taps poem. It is
far more grim and gory than “The Artilleryman’s Vision,” to which it
is related. The draft records “the groans of the wounded, the sight of
blood... The position of the dead, some with arms raised, poised in the
air, / Some lying curl’d on the ground—the dead in every position....
Some of the dead, how they turn black in the face and swollen.”
Then, after the battle, what a scene! O my sick soul! How
the dead lie,
The wounded—the surgeons and ambulances—
O the hideous hell, the damned hell of war [sic]
Were the preachers preaching of hell?
O there is no hell more damned than this hell of war
O what is here? O my beautiful young men! O the beautiful hair,
clotted! the faces!
Some on their backs with faces up & arms extended.^28Abandoning his efforts to depict the broad sweep of battle, Whitman
fashioned well-wrought poems whose scenes of limited focus are ¤ltered
through the lens of the compassionate persona. Only a few poems de-
scribe the pain-wracked bodies of the injured or the mangled corpses of
“Come Sweet Death!” / 171