task of burying a soldier on, or adjacent to, the ¤eld of battle was gener-
ally assigned to military burial squads, who had to dispose of the dead
unceremoniously and as hastily as possible.^33 “The slain of higher condi-
tion, ‘embalmed and iron-clad,’” observed Oliver Wendell Holmes, “were
sliding off on the railroad to their far homes; the dead of the rank and ¤le
were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth.”^34 In “Vigil
Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” the persona assumes the role of
a veteran combatant who is obliged to leave an injured soldier lying on
the ¤eld in order to rejoin an ongoing battle. When he returns at night-
fall, he ¤nds the soldier dead—“Found you in death so cold dear com-
rade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth
responding,) / Bared your face in the starlight.” A related lyric (“Look
Down Fair Moon”) invokes the “sacred moon with its “unstinted nimbus
®oods” to bathe the faces of “the dead on their backs with arms toss’d
wide”—faces that are “ghastly, swollen, purple.” The heavenly light ap-
pears to trans¤gure the soldier and make him holy. The soldier-persona’s
“vigil wondrous and vigil sweet here in the silent night” refers not only to
his tearless all-night watch over the dead soldier (his grief is beyond
tears) but to his observance of two revered Christian traditions—the
deathwatch and the laying out of the body for burial. This anonymous
soldier lying on an unnamed battle¤eld becomes an effective synecdoche
for the legions of soldiers who died and were unceremoniously or ig-
nominiously disposed of, many in unmarked graves, during the haste of
battle. Of the three hundred thousand soldiers who were buried in the
various military cemeteries, said Whitman, “more than half of them (and
that is really the most signi¤cant and eloquent bequest of the War) lie in
graves marked ‘unknown.’”^35 Memoranda During the War records his grief
for the thousands of these unknown soldiers, many of whom perished on
lonely roadsides, or were drowned, or vanished unaccountably. Wars every-
where are characterized by their missing in action, and the American Civil
War is among the most tragic examples in this respect. The poem cries
out to be read as a memorial for all the soldiers who died alone or without
proper burial or whose fates remained unknown to their loved ones. The
persona’s burial of the young soldier represents a ritual act of symbolic
closure for the nation’s unknown dead, here reverently buried, mourned
for, and remembered by one who loved them. As the attentive and loving
persona observes this death vigil (the word vigil, rich in sacred connota-
tions, occurs eight times in the twenty-six-line poem) and as he provides
174 / “Come Sweet Death!”