deaths of ¤remen, soldiers, swimmers, etc., Whitman may have intended
to illustrate the principle that the human soul must prove superior to
circumstance.”^47
In the ¤nal death-saturated sketch of section 33 the persona assumes
the guise of a battle-hardened veteran whose memory is haunted by the
horrors of an unnamed battle as he recalls “the ambulanza slowly passing
and trailing its red drip” and “[t]he whiz of limbs heads stone wood iron
high in the air.” The vignette ends with yet another powerful image in
which the terror of death is associated with choking and muteness:
Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general.... he furiously
waves his hand,
He gasps through the clot.... Mind not me.... mind.... the
entrenchments.As the general’s throat becomes clotted with blood, the choppy rhythms—
in this ¤rst-edition version of the couplet—mimic the sounds of his gag-
ging. Whitman, whose brother Andrew suffered for several years from
probable tuberculosis of the throat, was certainly familiar with these
sounds. The scene once more points up the poet’s near-obsession with
the fantasy of thoracic strangulation (like “the fakes of death” in section
26), which he seems to have conceived as the ultimate death-terror.
These scenes of violent death are succeeded, in sections 34 through
36, by two extended nationalistic episodes of death and heroism, both
based on popular accounts, which Whitman transforms into poetic myth.
Demonstrating his proclivity for the sort of “patriotic gore” that may have
suited the temperament of the 1850s, he lingers over the details of carnage
and death agonies. In section 34 (probably the weakest section of “Song
of Myself ”) the persona proposes (in a line added in 1867) to “tell what I
knew in Texas in my early youth”—that is, the bloody massacre at Goliad,
Texas, in 1836. In that year, at age seventeen, Whitman would have been
as old as many of the raw recruits who perished at the Battle of Goliad.
His decision to tell about Goliad rather than the better-known story
of the Alamo was a shrewd political choice. “In terms of tragedy and
strategical catastrophe,” says Thomas L. Brasher, “the Goliad massacre
outweighs the fall of the Alamo. ‘Remember Goliad’ should be substituted
for ‘Remember the Alamo.’ ” Indeed, “Remember Goliad” became the
battle cry of General Sam Houston’s Texas army and later became a cam-
56 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”