the newly dead,” cautions Lynch, “are not to be regarded as debris nor
remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, change-
lings, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our im-
ages and likenesses.... It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, care-
fully, with honor.”^40 By “the rising sun” the persona deposits his “son” in
“his “rude-dug grave” and concludes his “vigil for comrade swiftly slain.”
And like so many scenes of the war, this “vigil I never forget” becomes
inscribed in the persona’s memory and, as Whitman would hope, in the
memory of his nation.
The ultimate distillation of soldiers’ dying is compressed into a sacred
moment, when the persona gazes close-up at the faces of a trio of dead
soldiers. The ¤fteen lines of “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray
and Dim” strip away the trappings of war to focus on the faces of three
dead soldiers, seemingly beati¤ed in death. Emerging at dawn to “walk
in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,” the persona be-
holds the forms of three dead soldiers, wrapped in drab army-issue blan-
kets, who are about to receive burial. Since these soldiers had been cared
for in a military tent hospital, we may assume that their modest funerals
will be conducted by members of the United States Sanitary Commis-
sion, who registered and marked their graves. As Gary Laderman ex-
plains in his study of nineteenth-century death practices, “burial rites for
those who died in the hospitals for most of the con®ict included the reg-
istration of the death, the placement of the corpse in a cof¤n with some
form of written identi¤cation, a small military escort from the hospital to
the grave, the presence of an army chaplain to perform a brief service, the
¤ring of arms, the playing of the ‘Dead March’ if a band was available (a
¤fe or drum would do if not), and the erection of a board at the grave
site.” Whitman himself described the procedure in these unpublished
lines:
The graves with slight boards, rudely inscribed with the names,
The front of the hospital, the dead brought out, lying there so still,
The piece of board, hastily inscribed with the name, placed on
the breast to be ready,
The squad at the burial, ¤ring a volley over the grave.^41Whitman sharply criticized the medical treatment that the soldiers re-
ceived in some of the military installations he visited and decried the
176 / “Come Sweet Death!”