“little captain,” serene, bright-eyed, his voice attesting to his inspirational
life force. After hours of savage ¤ghting, his ship taking on water and left
with only three serviceable guns, Jones composedly intones the memorable
words, “We have just begun our part of the ¤ghting.” And the remaining
crew of the Bonhomme Richard board the Serapis to accept its surrender.
Section 35 serves, in effect, as a prologue to the sensuous and death-
saturated description of carnage that makes section 36 a high-water mark
in Leaves of Grass and, indeed, in all of English-language poetry.^54 Al-
though Whitman had never witnessed any military or naval actions, sec-
tion 36 conveys a sense of ¤rst-hand observation. Its structure and drama,
its intense musicality, and its chiaroscuro contrasts between the beautiful
and the grim indicate the in®uence of operatic and symphonic music and
of American landscape and seascape painting on Whitman’s poetry.^55
Against the backdrop of midnight stillness, lit by the ®ames of the burn-
ing ship that is rocked by the soothing waves, Whitman displays the
casualties of battle and of the primitive medical practice before the advent
of anesthesia and asepsis, when amputation was virtually the only known
method to save the lives of men with damaged extremities. We see and
hear the casualties of war—“the corpse of the child that served in the
cabin, / The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully
curled whiskers”; “formless stacks of bodies by themselves... dabs of
®esh upon the mast and spars”; “the hiss of the surgeon’s knife and the
gnawing teeth of his saw, / The wheeze, the cluck, and the swash of fall-
ing blood... the short wild screams, the long tapering groans.” Whit-
man’s words confer upon these anonymous sailors an aura of sainthood.
Recalling their heroism and the horrors he has witnessed, the persona
cries out, “these so... these irretrievable.” These four words refocus our
attention from the battle action to its witness-persona and his inventor—
the aspiring national poet. The past, we know, is never fully (or accu-
rately) “retrievable,” even by the most acute witness or by the best mind.
But by his act of poetic reconstruction Whitman has, in a sense, retrieved
and reshaped a vital moment in American mytho-history. The incident is
also “irretrievable” because the witness-persona can never wholly recap-
ture the intense excitement aroused in him in the moments that he wit-
nessed the awesome carnage. No artistic reconstruction can evoke the
ultimate terror of such an experience; no words can adequately describe
it. The ultimate experience of dying remains forever “irretrievable” to the
living.
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 59