ranks of returning soldiers to discern beneath each facial mask the inde-
structible soul “as great as any... waiting secure and content, which the
bullet could never kill.” Whitman still viewed these soldiers as archetypal
“American young men”—the best hope for America’s democratic future.
Observing one contingent of the two hundred thousand homeward-
bound Union soldiers parading through the streets of Washington, many
of them feeble and disabled, Whitman expressed his admiration for what
he considered their quintessentially “weatherbeaten” American look and
their “unmistakable Western physiognomy and idiom.”^62 In “Dirge for
Two Veterans” the persona pictures himself standing on a Washington city
curbside among a group of mourners and witnessing a “sad procession”—
a cortege for two soldiers, father and son, both killed in action and for
whom “the double grave awaits.” He hears the bugles and drums, each
drumbeat striking him “through and through.” Unlike the exhilarating
drumbeat of “Beat! Beat! Drums!” that at the beginning of the war had
rallied able-bodied men to abandon their work and enlist in the Union
armies, the nine richly cadenced stanzas of the “Dirge” are written (in
Whitman’s own phrase) in the slow, steady rhythm of “a strong dead-
march.” And as the persona, by the light of the rising moon, watches the
cof¤ns of the two veterans “passing to burial,” the rude music inspires
another prayer for the all the war dead.
“Lo, Victress on the Peaks” dedicates Whitman’s “cluster” of war
poems—with their depictions of “night’s darkness and blood-dripping
wounds, / And psalms of the dead”—to Mother “Libertad,” the spirit of
American freedom. And “Old War-Dreams” rehearses the persona’s (and
possibly Whitman’s own) recurring nightmare of moving impassively
“through the carnage” and “gather[ing] the heaps.” Each of its stanzas
ends with the refrain, “I dream, I dream, I dream.”
In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
Of the look at ¤rst of the mortally wounded, (of that
indescribable look,)
Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
I dream, I dream, I dream.However, “Ashes of Soldiers” (which Whitman later placed in the “Songs
of Parting” section of Leaves of Grass) records a happier dream in which
the persona beholds “the slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris
“Come Sweet Death!” / 187