Over the tree-tops I ®oat thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad ¤elds and the
prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I ®oat this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.The poet prays that his carol, like the waves of the sea or the currents of
the air, may “undulate” throughout the world to comfort and strengthen
all those who must confront death. Death, says the carol, is to be wel-
comed no less than birth, knowledge, joy, or love. If death is accepted on
these terms, says David Kuebrich, then Lincoln’s death, too, may be ¤-
nally understood as “ultimately neither a personal nor a national tragedy.”^97
The persona’s tribute to death as a “cool-embracing” mother coexists
with his anguished awareness that death also operates as a senseless de-
stroyer. As Stephen E. Whicher says, the thrush’s song succeeds only
temporarily in “weaving a veil of life-illusion over the same hard truth
and so easing it for us.”^98 Inevitably, the portrayal of death as a gentle
mother is supplanted, in the following section (section 15), by the per-
sona’s tormented “panoramic vision”—the phrase “I saw” is repeated ¤f-
teen times—triggered by his memories of the war as a merciless slaughter-
house. As though he were reliving a soundless nightmare, he beholds
“askant ” through the battle¤eld’s smoke the “bullet-pierced bodies of sol-
diers,” the “white skeletons of young men,” and the “debris and debris of
all the slain soldiers in the war.”
Although both the soothing death carol and the terrifying death pano-
rama are centered in the persona’s imagination they need not be inter-
preted as separate actions that occur in discrete time frames. Like many
a romantic opera in which an aria conveys one mood or situation while
the accompanying orchestral music and the background action convey a
contrasting mood or situation, the bird’s exuberant death-hymn, we may
assume, takes place in the persona’s mind concurrently, and perhaps jar-
ringly, with his “long panoramic vision” of the war’s carnage. In a sense,
the visions may be said to be superimposed on one another. But unlike
music, drama, or ¤lm, which lend themselves to the simultaneous depic-
tion of contrasting actions or moods, the limitations of poetry required
Whitman to relegate the carol of the bird and the vision of the battle-
¤elds to successive sections of the poem, thus permitting the reader to
conclude that the persona’s retrospective impressions of these events oc-
“Come Sweet Death!” / 203