by Walt Whitman
Thanks in Old Age
Life and Death
The Voice of the Rain
Soon Shall the Winter’s Foil Be Here
While Not the Past Forgetting
The Dying Veteran
Stronger Lessons
A Prairie Sunset
Twenty Years
Orange Buds by Mail from Florida
Twilight
You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me
Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone
The Dead Emperor
As the Greek’s Signal Flame
The Dismantled Ship
Now Precedent Songs, Farewell
An Evening Lull
Old Age’s Lambent Peaks
After the Supper and Talk
BOOK XXXV.
Sail out for Good, Eidolon Yacht!
Lingering Last Drops
Good-Bye My Fancy
On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!
My 71st Year
Apparitions
The Pallid Wreath
An Ended Day
Old Age’s Ship & Crafty Death’s
To the Pending Year
Shakspere-Bacon’s Cipher
Long, Long Hence
Bravo, Paris Exposition!
Interpolation Sounds
To the Sun-Set Breeze
Old Chants
A Christmas Greeting
Sounds of the Winter
A Twilight Song
When the Full-Grown Poet Came
Osceola
A Voice from Death
A Persian Lesson
The Commonplace
“The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete”
Mirages
L. of G.’s Purport
The Unexpress’d
Grand Is the Seen
Unseen Buds
Good-Bye My Fancy!
DRUM-TAPS
FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE
EIGHTEEN SIXTY-ONE
BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!
FROM PAUMANOK STARTING I FLY LIKE A BIRD
SONG OF THE BANNER AT DAYBREAK
RISE O DAYS FROM YOUR FATHOMLESS DEEPS
VIRGINIA—THE WEST
CITY OF SHIPS
THE CENTENARIAN’S STORY
CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD
BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE
AN ARMY CORPS ON THE MARCH
BY THE BIVOUAC’S FITFUL FLAME
COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER
VIGIL STRANGE I KEPT ON THE FIELD ONE NIGHT
A MARCH IN THE RANKS HARD-PREST, AND THE ROAD UNKNOWN
A SIGHT IN CAMP IN THE DAYBREAK GRAY AND DIM
AS TOILSOME I WANDER’D VIRGINIA’S WOODS
NOT THE PILOT
YEAR THAT TREMBLED AND REEL’D BENEATH ME
THE WOUND-DRESSER
LONG, TOO LONG AMERICA
GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN
DIRGE FOR TWO VETERANS
OVER THE CARNAGE ROSE PROPHETIC A VOICE
I SAW OLD GENERAL AT BAY
THE ARTILLERYMAN’S VISION
ETHIOPIA SALUTING THE COLOURS
NOT YOUTH PERTAINS TO ME
RACE OF VETERANS
WORLD TAKE GOOD NOTICE
O TAN-FACED PRAIRIE-BOY
LOOK DOWN FAIR MOON
RECONCILIATION
HOW SOLEMN AS ONE BY ONE
AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO
DELICATE CLUSTER
TO A CERTAIN CIVILIAN
LO, VICTRESS ON THE PEAKS
SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE
ADIEU TO A SOLDIER
TURN O LIBERTAD
TO THE LEAVEN’D SOIL THEY TROD
THE WOUND DRESSER
PREFACE
THE GREAT ARMY OF THE WOUNDED
LIFE AMONG FIFTY THOUSAND SOLDIERS
HOSPITAL VISITS
LETTERS OF 1862-3
LETTERS OF 1864
THE LETTERS OF ANNE GILCHRIST AND WALT WHITMAN
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
A WOMAN’S ESTIMATE OF WALT WHITMAN
A CONFESSION OF FAITH
LETTER I
LETTER II
LETTER III
LETTER IV
LETTER V
LETTER VI
LETTER VII
LETTER VIII
LETTER IX
LETTER X
LETTER XI
LETTER XII
LETTER XIII
LETTER XIV
LETTER XV
LETTER XVI
LETTER XVII
LETTER XVIII
LETTER XIX
LETTER XX
LETTER XXI
LETTER XXII
LETTER XXIII
LETTER XXIV
LETTER XXV
LETTER XXVI
LETTER XXVII
LETTER XXVIII
LETTER XXIX
LETTER XXX
LETTER XXXI
LETTER XXXII
LETTER XXXIII
LETTER XXXIV
LETTER XXXV
LETTER XXXVI
LETTER XXXVII
LETTER XXXVIII
LETTER XXXIX
LETTER XL
LETTER XLI
LETTER XLII
LETTER XLIII
LETTER XLIV
LETTER XLV
LETTER XLVI
LETTER XLVII
LETTER XLVIII
LETTER XLIX
LETTER L
LETTER LI
LETTER LII
LETTER LIII
LETTER LIV
LETTER LV
LETTER LVI
LETTER LVII
LETTER LVIII
LETTER LIX
LETTER LX
LETTER LXI
LETTER LXII
LETTER LXIII
LETTER LXIV
LETTER LXV
LETTER LXVI
LETTER LXVII
LETTER LXVIII
LETTER LXIX
LETTER LXX
LETTER LXXI
LETTER LXXII
LETTER LXXIII
LETTER LXXIV
LETTER LXXV
LETTER LXXVI
DRUM-TAPS
INTRODUCTION
When the first days of August loured over the world, time seemed to stand still. A universal astonishment and confusion fell, as upon a flock of sheep perplexed by strange dogs. But now, though never before was a St. Lucy’s Day so black with “absence, darkness, death,” Christmas is gone. Spring comes swiftly, the almond trees flourish. Easter will soon be here. Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise. Yet still a kind of instinctive blindness blots out the prospect of the future. Until the long horror of the war is gone from our minds, we shall be able to think of nothing that has not for its background a chaotic darkness. Like every obsession, it gnaws at thought, follows us into our dreams and returns with the morning. But there have been other wars. And humanity, after learning as best it may their brutal lesson, has survived them. Just as the young soldier leaves home behind him and accepts hardship and danger as to the manner born, so, when he returns again, life will resume its old quiet wont. Nature is not idle even in the imagination. It is man’s salvation to forget no less than it is his salvation to remember. And it is wise even in the midst of the conflict to look back on those that are past and to prepare for the returning problems of the future.
When Whitman wrote his “Democratic Vistas,” the long embittered war between the Northern and Southern States of America was a thing only of yesterday. It is a headlong amorphous production—a tangled meadow of “leaves of grass” in prose. But it is as cogent to-day as it was when it was written:
To the ostent of the senses and eyes [he writes], the influences which stamp the world’s history are wars, uprisings, or downfalls of dynasties.... These, of course, play their part; yet, it may be, a single new
thought, imagination, abstract principle ... put in shape by some great literatus, and projected among mankind, may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.
The literatus who realized this had his own message in mind. And yet, justly. For those who might point to the worldly prosperity and material comforts of his country, and ask, Are not these better indeed than any utterances even of greatest rhapsodic, artist, or literatus? he has his irrefutable answer. He surveys the New York of 1870, “its façades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance of design,” etc., in his familiar catalogical jargon, and shutting his eyes to its glow and grandeur, inquires in return, Are there indeed men here worthy the name? Are there perfect women? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one? We ourselves in good time shall have to face and to answer these questions. They search our keenest hopes of the peace that is coming. And we may be fortified perhaps by the following queer proof of history repeating itself:
Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster’d exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition—never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation—more loftily elevated as head and sample— than they are on the surface of our Republican States this day. The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.
Whitman had no very tender regard for the Germany of his time. He fancied that the Germans were like the Chinese, only less graceful and refined and more brutish. But neither had he any particular affection for any relic of Europe. “Never again will we trust the moral sense or abstract friendliness of a single Government of the Old World.” He accepted selections from its literature for the new American Adam. But even its greatest poets were not America’s, and though he might welcome even Juvenal, it was for use and not for worship. We have to learn, he insists, that the best culture will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect. In our children rests every hope and promise, and therefore in their mothers. “Disengage yourselves from parties.... These savage and wolfish parties alarm me.... Hold yourself judge and master over all of them.” Only faith can save us, the faith in ourselves and in our fellow-men which is of the true faith in goodness and in God. The idea of the mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, filled this poet with a singular awe. Passionately he pleads for the dignity of the common people. It is the average man of a land that is important. To win the people back to a proud belief and confidence in life, to rapture in this wonderful world, to love and admiration—this was his burning desire. I demand races of orbic bards, he rhapsodizes, sweet democratic despots, to dominate and even destroy. The Future! Vistas! The throes of birth are upon us. Allons, camarado!
He could not despair. “Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?” he asks himself in “Drum-Taps.” But wildest shuttlecock of criticism though he is, he has never yet been charged with looking only on the dark side of things. Once, he says, “Once, before the war (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!), I too, was fill’d with doubt and gloom.” His part in it soothed, mellowed, deepened his great nature. He had himself witnessed such misery, cruelty, and abomination as it is best just now, perhaps, not to read about. One fact alone is enough; that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. During 1862-65 he visited, he says, eighty to a hundred thousand sick and wounded soldiers, comprehending all, slighting none. Rebel or compatriot, it made no difference. “I loved the young man,” he cries again and again. Pity and fatherliness were in his face, for his heart was full of them. Mr. Gosse has described “the old Gray” as he saw him in 1884, in his bare, littered sun-drenched room in Camden, shared by kitten and canary:
He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards. With his head so poised and the whole man fixed in contemplation of the interlocutor he seemed to pass into a state of absolute passivity ... the glassy eyes half closed, the large knotted hands spread out before him. He resembled, in fact, nothing so much as “a great old grey Angora Tom,” alert in repose, serenely blinking under his combed waves of hair, with eyes inscrutably dreaming.... As I stood in dull, deserted Mickle Street once more, my heart was full of affection for this beautiful old man ... this old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience and philosophy.
Whitman was then sixty-five. In a portrait of thirty years before there is just a wraith of that feline dream, perhaps, but it is a face of a rare grace and beauty that looks out at us, of a profound kindness and compassion. And, in the eyes, not so much penetration as visionary absorption. Such was the man to whom nothing was unclean, nothing too trivial (except “pale poetlings lisping cadenzas piano,” who then apparently thronged New York) to take to himself. Intensest, indomitablest of individualists, he exulted in all that appertains to that forked radish, Man. This contentious soul of mine, he exclaims ecstatically; Viva: the attack! I have been born the same as the war was born; I lull nobody, and you will never understand me: maybe I am non-literary and un-decorous.... I have written impromptu, and shall let it all go at that. Let me at least be human! Human, indeed, he was, a tender, all-welcoming host of Everyman, of his idolized (if somewhat overpowering) American democracy. Man in the street, in his swarms, poor crazed faces in the State asylum, prisoners in Sing Sing, prostitute, whose dead body reminded him not of a lost soul, but only of a sad, forlorn, and empty house—it mattered not; he opened his heart to them, one and all. “I see beyond each mark that wonder, a kindred soul. O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend.”
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
“Yours for you,” he exclaims, welding in a phrase his unparalleled egotism, his beautiful charity, “yours for you, who ever you are, as mine for me.” It is the essence of philosophy and of religion, for all the wonders of heaven and earth are significant “only because of the Me in the centre.”
This was the secret of his tender, unassuming ministrations. He had none of that shrinking timidity, that fear of intrusion, that uneasiness in the presence of the tragic and the pitiful, which so often numb and oppress those who would willingly give themselves and their best to the needy and suffering, but whose intellect misgives them. He was that formidable phenomenon, a dreamer of action. But he possessed a sovran good sense. Food and rest and clean clothes were his scrupulous preparation for his visits. He always assumed as cheerful an appearance as possible. Armed with bright new five-cent and ten-cent bills (the wounded, he found, were often “broke,” and the sight of a little money “helped their spirits”), with books and stationery and tobacco, for one a twist of good strong green tea, for another a good home-made rice-pudding, or a jar of sparkling but innocent blackberry and cherry syrup, a small bottle of horse-radish pickle, or a large handsome apple, he would “make friends.” “What I have I also give you,” he cried from the bottom of his grieved, tempestuous heart. He would talk, or write letters—passionate love-letters, too—or sit silent, in mute and tender kindness. “Long, long, I gazed ... leaning my chin in my hands, passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours, with you, dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word, Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier.” And how many a mother must have blessed the stranger who could bring such last news of a son as this: “And now like many other noble and good
men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy—yet there is a text, ‘God doeth all things well’—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul.” It is only love that can comfort the loving.
He forced nothing on these friends of a day, so many of them near their last farewell. A poor wasted young man asks him to read a chapter in the New Testament, and Whitman chooses that which describes Christ’s Crucifixion. He “ask’d me to read the following chapter also, how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, for he was feeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask’d me if I enjoy’d religion. I said ‘Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, yet maybe, it is the same thing.’” This is only one of many such serene intimacies in Whitman’s experiences of the war. Through them we reach to an understanding of a poet who chose not signal and beautiful episodes out of the past, nor the rare moments of existence, for theme, but took all life, within and around him in vast bustling America, for his poetic province. Like a benign barbaric sun he surveys the world, ever at noon. I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there, he cries in the “Song of Myself.” I do not despise you priests, all times, the world over.... He could not despise anything, not even his fellow-poets, because he himself was everything. His verse sometimes seems mere verbiage, but it is always a higgledy-piggledy, Santa Claus bagful of things. And he could penetrate to the essential reality. He tells in his “Drum-Taps” how one daybreak he arose in camp, and saw three still forms stretched out in the eastern radiance, how with light fingers he just lifted the blanket from each cold face in turn: the first elderly, gaunt, and grim—Who are you, my dear comrade? The next with cheeks yet blooming—Who are you, sweet boy? The third—Young man, I think I know you. I think this face is the face of the Christ Himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
True poetry focuses experience, not merely transmits it. It must redeem it for ever from transitoriness and evanescence. Whitman incontinently pours experience out in a Niagara-like cataract. But in spite of his habitual publicity he was at heart of a “shy, brooding, impassioned devotional type”; in spite of his self-conscious, arrogant virility, he was to the end of his life an entranced child. He came into the world, saw and babbled. His deliberate method of writing could have had no other issue. A subject would occur to him, a kind of tag. He would scribble it down on a scrap of paper and drop it into a drawer. Day by day this first impulse would evoke fresh “poemets,” until at length the accumulation was exhaustive. Then he merely gutted his treasury and the ode was complete. It was only when sense and feeling attained a sort of ecstasy that he succeeded in distilling the true essence that is poetry and in enstopping it in a crystal phial of form.
