an honorable burial for the unknown soldier, whom he addresses as “my
comrade” and “my son,” he becomes the surrogate for all the loving par-
ents, siblings, and comrades of the dead in whose stead he has performed
these traditional burial rites that celebrate the sacredness of existence.
Much of Drum-Taps, as M. Wynn Thomas has noted, assumes a “ritu-
alistic and liturgical character.”^36 Enshrouding and burying the soldier’s
body transforms this death, and by extension the deaths of countless sol-
diers, into a sacred action in which grieving families and friends, symboli-
cally at least, could ¤nd a measure of surcease. Wrapping a soldier’s body
in an army-issue blanket and burying him in a shallow grave on or near
the battle¤eld was sometimes a necessary practice, particularly when the
troops were under ¤re. During the earlier phases of the war, when there
was no adequate ambulance service, vast numbers of soldiers were aban-
doned to die on the ¤eld of battle.^37 When viewed against such a back-
ground, the persona’s deed is particularly touching, but it is far more than
a simple act of mercy. “I faithfully loved you and cared for you living,” says
the persona to the dead soldier, and voicing the hope of personal immor-
tality, he adds, “I think we shall surely meet again.” Attention has been
drawn—perhaps overdrawn—to the “strange combination of compassion
and arrogant assertion through which ‘my son’ becomes Christ buried by
the poet/god just as the dawn announces not the son’s resurrection, but
that of the poet/god transformed.”^38 But in laying out the soldier’s body
the persona has performed a sel®ess act and observed a hallowed ritual
that commemorates the sanctity of death. Philippe Ariès provides a con-
text to help us understand that
the laying out of a body is a traditional rite; however, its meaning
has changed. Formerly the purpose was to arrange the body in a
position representing that era’s ideal image of death, that of a re-
cumbent ef¤gy, its hands crossed, waiting for its life in the after-
world. It was in the Romantic era that men discovered the special
beauty that death imposed on a human face, and the purpose of
the ¤nal solicitude was to free this beauty from the death agonies
that spoiled it... to retain an image of death—a beautiful corpse,
but a corpse.^39An observation by Thomas Lynch, who is both a poet and a professional
undertaker, also helps us interpret the persona’s actions. “The bodies of
“Come Sweet Death!” / 175