alive.” In this dream, the “phantoms of the dead” who are “Invisible to
the rest henceforth become my companions, / Follow me ever—desert
me not while I live.” In a line that fuses the senses of sight, sound, and
taste, he declares that the living are dear to him, “but sweet, ah sweet, are
the dead with their silent eyes” who ¤ll his dreams. He craves the bless-
ings of these dead, imploring them to make him their voice and to let the
exhalations from their corpses perfume his words. And he invokes the
soil of battle¤elds, “the wordless earth, witness of war and peace,” leav-
ened with the bodies and blood of the war’s dead, to be his muse, to make
him a “fountain” whose ever-living words will moisten “the ashes of all
dead soldiers South or North.”
Finally, the six incomparable lines of “Reconciliation” encapsulate
Whitman’s cherished identity with the war’s dead and his wish to be a
peacemaker. They express his faith that love and death are congruent ele-
ments that will humanize mankind and will ultimately abolish the very
memory of war and inaugurate the reign of peace. The idea of reconcilia-
tion, mythologized in the poem’s ¤rst four lines, is translated in its closing
couplet into a magnanimous speech-act. Whitman had repeatedly de-
clared his love for all soldiers, and here, as the persona bestows a com-
radely kiss on his representative dead enemy, he takes his place as his
nation’s poet-reconciler.
Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and its deeds of carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly
wash again, and ever again and again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the cof¤n—I draw
near, and lightly touch with my lips the white face in the
cof¤n.^633
Of Whitman’s crowning wartime poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-
yard Bloom’d,” the British critic John Bailey declared more than seven
188 / “Come Sweet Death!”