At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of
bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)
I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white
as a lily).^31In the third section the persona sweeps his lens in a panoramic survey of
the ghastly scene to capture the bodies of the living and the dead; sur-
geons operating in the dim, ®ickering light amid the sickening smells of
ether and blood; “the glisten of little steel instruments”; and “the crowd
of bloody forms” lying on planks or stretchers or on the bare ground out-
side the church building, “some in the death spasm sweating.” Then, in
the closing six lines he con®ates past and present, experience and undying
memory into a speech act. In “Song of Myself,” section 36, we may recall,
the persona, having imprinted the details of “an old-time sea-¤ght” on
his memory, exclaims, “These so, these irretrievable.” In the same way,
the persona in “A March in the Ranks” takes mental photographs of these
scenes and exclaims, “These I resume as I chant,” so that the scenes be-
come embedded in his memory and in his poem. Finally, before he re-
sponds to the orders to resume the march down the endless “road un-
known” we see the healer-persona “bend to the dying lad” whose bloody
wound he had earlier dressed and whose anxieties he had apparently
calmed. With “his eyes open, a half-smile he gives me,” the persona re-
cords. “Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth in the dark-
ness.” That “half-smile” of the dying soldier marks the ritual bonding
between the persona and his dying soldier-“son.” His empathetic inter-
action with one lily-faced soldier lad, whose marble-like visage suggests
that of a saint who has died for a sacred cause, mythologizes Whitman’s
devotion to thousands of soldiers, and trans¤gures both the representa-
tive soldier and the persona. Perhaps by observing the calm with which
so many soldiers faced the end and by composing these poems, it has
been suggested, Whitman was able to salvage his own sense of humanity
and individuality in these trying days.^32
The pallid, dying soldier of “A March in the Ranks” has a counterpart
in “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” a passionate poem in
which Whitman again singles out an individual soldier fatally injured in
battle. Those who died in the military hospitals were generally buried
with some measure of military honors and religious observance, but the
“Come Sweet Death!” / 173