Touch my mouth ere you depart, press my lips close,
Leave me your pulses of rage—bequeath them to me—¤ll me
with currents convulsive,
Let them scorch and blister out of my chants when you are gone,
Let them identify you to the future in these songs.And in the impassioned lyric “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” the per-
sona imagines that he can hear “the Mother of All”—the spirit of life
and death—plead with the earth, the trees, the mountainsides, and the
rivers to cherish and to preserve the essences of the war’s Missing in Ac-
tion, whose bodies lie in unmarked graves and in unknown and un-
hallowed places, so “that they may live” in “unslaughter’d vitality.”^61 Just
as “This Compost” assumes that the earth, through its divine chemistry,
accepts human leavings and transforms them into new life essences, so
“Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” beseeches the earth to process the sweet
exhalations—the “fragrance” emanating from the soldiers’ graves—into
the mystic af®atus that will invigorate American democracy and perme-
ate these poems.
My dead absorb or South or North—my young men’s bodies
absorb, and their precious precious blood,
Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me
many a year hence...
Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not
an atom be lost,
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.The exhalations from the soldiers’ burial sites—like the leaves grow-
ing from the breast of Whitman-Osiris in “Scented Herbage of My
Breast”—reiterate Whitman’s abiding faith in the essential goodness of
the cycle of life, decay, and rebirth. The soil leavened by the blood of the
war’s dead in the “endless vistas” of America’s North and South, and
hence made sacred, is also the subject of “To the Leaven’d Soil They
Trod,” the hymnlike poem that concludes Sequel to Drum-Taps.
Several elegiac poems written at the close of the war also express
Whitman’s lasting empathy for the war’s dead. “How Solemn as One by
One” shows the persona probing beneath the impassive visages in the
186 / “Come Sweet Death!”