the dead, and none report any soldier’s outcry against going unwillingly
into the dreaded night of death. Most are devoted to the individual dying
or dead soldiers with whom the persona experiences an intimate mystic
communion. Through this lens they seem to attain an ineffable beauty
and serenity. And in order to heighten the illusion of intimacy, the per-
sona “spotlights” their faces and their eyes. Reading these scenes of the
persona’s loving devotion could have nourished the hopes of the wartime
public that their ailing or dying sons and brothers had been comforted by
a sympathetic attendant (like Whitman) at their side. Whitman had long
been fascinated by the “language” of photography, and some of the poetic
techniques he developed in these poems range from close-ups to pano-
ramas. Indeed, photographers had became ubiquitous during the war,
taking pictures not only of battle scenes but also of soldiers living and
dead to be sent to families or to local newspapers.^29 The reverential close-
ups of dying soldiers in some of Whitman’s poems endow their subjects
with almost-visible halos—a practice that could help to comfort a public
hopeful that their dead may have died peaceably.
The twenty-¤ve lines of “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the
Road Unknown”—a masterpiece of compressed agony—demonstrate that
the poet had found his proper voice and his ideal persona as an ambula-
tory witness and healer. Its four balanced sections, each viewed from a
clearly de¤ned camera angle, center on the acute sensibilities of the per-
sona, who appears—rather ambiguously—as a soldier or a medic. The
¤rst section pictures the remnant of a decimated army unit arriving at
night at a country church that serves as a makeshift hospital. In the sec-
ond section, the hellish scene inside the church is illuminated by ®icker-
ing torches. Whitman had in fact been reading Dante’s Inferno, which he
praised for its “great vigor, a lean and muscular ruggedness, no super-
®uous ®esh” and a style “so gaunt, so haggard and un-rich, un-joyous.”^30
His own style in “A March in the Ranks” is correspondingly terse.
Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles
and lamps,
And by one great pitchy torch stationary, with wild red ®ame
and clouds of smoke,
By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see, on the ®oor,
some in pews laid down,172 / “Come Sweet Death!”