bed.”^44 The grieving families treasured these affecting letters, often a
family’s only record of a soldiers’ last hours. In the poem “Come up from
the Fields Father” Whitman tries to picture how such a gloomy missive
might have been received by the family of one such soldier. He does so
by transforming his persona into an unseen spirit-presence who hovers
over the family’s farm, transported there, one assumes, by the electrical
magic of the words contained in his letter. Some contemporary mediums
advertised that their healing powers could be transmitted with the words
they wrote—the very paper and ink that they used—and a somewhat
similar ¤ction underlies the poem’s assumption that some manifestation
of the persona’s self has been transmitted with, and embodied in, this
letter.^45 In a melodramatic style, “Come up from the Fields Father” pic-
tures an Ohio farm where the harvest-ready ¤elds and orchards display
the ever-renewed plenitude of nature and form a backdrop to the family’s
receipt of the letter announcing the loss of a son and brother. As an em-
pathetic, if invisible, witness to the family’s grief for a boy that they, and
he, had loved, the mediumistic persona views the family’s horri¤ed reac-
tion. His voice merges with that of the stricken mother whose only wish
now is to be with her son in death and whose intense grief epitomizes the
pain felt by thousands of mothers who have received letters announcing
the loss of their sons.
Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s
soul!
All swims before her eyes, ®ashes with black, she catches the
main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish,
taken to hospital,
At present low, will soon be better.Having witnessed the boy’s decline in a military hospital, the letter-
writing persona interjects a silent comment:
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be
better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home in the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead. [emphasis added]“Come Sweet Death!” / 179