above, / Not for the present alone, for a thousand years, chanting through
you, / This song to the soul of one poor little child.” That child, repre-
senting the patriotic soul of America, acknowledges the poem’s poet-
persona as the nation’s “masterful” bard—a bold gesture of wish ful-
¤llment. And when the Banner sings of “demons and death... and a
pleasure new and ecstatic,” one can sense the allure that violence and
death sometimes held for Whitman. The persona declares his readiness
to defend the American “idea,” which still remains “out of reach, an idea
only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody death, loved by me.”^13 What
exactly this national “idea” might be—whether the preservation of the
Union, the defeat of slavery, the promotion of democracy, or some other
principle—is never clari¤ed in this bombast. But the “idea,” in the con-
text of the poem, de¤nitely embodies the popular concept that the war
will somehow promote national unity—Hegel’s principle that “by arous-
ing the passions of solidarity and transcendence, war makes nations, or
at least revives and refreshes them.”^14 Thus before he left for Washing-
ton Whitman had already positioned himself as America’s wartime poet-
designate.
The inability of the New York–based Whitman to ¤nd an appropriate
poetic voice is evident in “The Centenarian’s Story.” The poem is in-
tended to demonstrate what Whitman elsewhere calls the “peerless, pas-
sionate, good cause”—the patriotic dedication to the democratic ideal
that even in the face of defeat presumably runs like an unbroken thread
through America’s history. The poem’s central ¤gure, an ancient veteran
of America’s War for Independence, watches the drilling of young volun-
teers in Brooklyn’s Washington Park and tremulously recalls the Battle of
Brooklyn, which had occurred on that very site—a holding action in
which General Washington’s troops were “terribly thinned” by enemy
¤re. The old veteran recalls seeing “the moisture gather in drops on the
face of the General,” who “wrung his hands in anguish.” But he also re-
calls Washington’s de¤ant look as he resolved to snatch victory from the
jaws of this temporary setback, just as the North, it was assumed, would
quickly turn its early defeats into victories. Nevertheless, the poem is an
artistic failure because it is so far removed from the war’s essential action
and because the (still unformed) wartime Whitman persona is charac-
terized only as a passive bystander listening to an elderly observer sum-
mon up his memories of an earlier war.
Whitman’s continuing search for a poetic persona who would be both
166 / “Come Sweet Death!”