Lincoln and Whitman
Page 27
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me;
The gray-brown bird I know, receiv’d us comrades three;
And he sang what seem’d the song of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars, and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the singing of the bird.
And the charm of the singing rapt me,
As I held, as if by their hands, my comrades in the night;
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
16
Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! O praise and praise,
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach, encompassing Death—strong Deliveress!
When it is so—when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee—adornments and feastings for thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky, are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song!
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death!
17
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist, and the swamp-perfume;
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
18
I saw the vision of armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody;
And at last but a few shreds of the flags left on the sta fs, (and all in silence,)
And the sta fs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all dead soldiers;
But I saw they were not as I thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they su fer’d not;
The living remained and su fer’d—the mother su fer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade su fer’d,
And the armies that remain’d su fer’d.
19
Passing the visions, passing the night;
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands;
Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, (yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,)
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from the recesses.
20
Must I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves?
Must I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring?
Must I pass from my song for thee;
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night?
21
Yet each I keep, and all;
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, I keep,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul, I keep,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe;
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor;
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well;
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands . . . and this for his dear sake;
Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.
As in the great English elegies that served as Whitman’s models—Milton’s “Lycidas,” and Shelley’s “Adonais”—the true name of the deceased is never mentioned. This is wholly fitting here because “Lilacs” honors not just the President but all “the dead I loved so well,” hundreds of soldiers Whitman had attended in the hospitals. Lincoln becomes the “powerful, western, fallen star,” one of the “trinity” of symbols that includes lilacs, with their fragrance an emblem of breath (spirit) and regeneration, and the thrush, representing in turn “the thought of him I love” and “Death’s outlet song of life,” before becoming the poet’s voice and the very elegy he is creating.
To these three symbols Whitman adds a fourth major trope, the allegorical figure of Death, the veiled “Dark Mother” he summons in the sublime section 16 of his poem: “Come, lovely and soothing Death, / Undulate round the world, serenely arriving . . . Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?” She is reminiscent of “the Maternal Figure over all,” shining at the top of the Capitol dome Whitman admired.
In the drama of the poem the poet moves from the bedrock of the present moment, where he asks his central question, What is the fitting tribute for such a man?, to the realms of revery and vision—the beautiful American landscape in spring (sections 11, 12, and 14) and the nightmare memories of war (section 18). Although he does not find his answer in either realm, the journey is intrinsically valuable, as it yields poetic imagery—and it is in the poetry itself that the mourner will find consolation at last.
Whitman identified his poetry with his ideal of the democratic nation, a nurturing Union that sanctified human love, of man for man, man for woman, mother for child, etc. He believed he had been born of this ideal Union, and he regarded it as the end to which he was inevitably and appropriately consecrated. America had made him, and America would reclaim him. Poetry had blessed him, and poetry would forever enfold him. No wonder he wanted to make his own books! In the infirmity of old age he would take great pains to design his own mausoleum, at a fabulous cost.
The demise of his democratic hero, Lincoln, provided the poet with an occasion to celebrate Death as the “Dark Mother,” the “strong Deliveress,” to link death boldly with birth. Whitman
’s death song, often called the “Death Carol,” in section 16, is his most precious gift for the slain hero—and for himself as well—for it frees both the President and the poet from the bonds of the grave. It is the peaceful absolution of a soldier’s missionary, one who had sat at so many bedsides and watched so many a young man peacefully breathe his last in the arms of the “strong Deliveress.” In his earlier poem “The Dresser,” he first calls upon Her: “Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.” In that poem and others in Drum-Taps Whitman’s intimacy with maternal Death is so complete he appears to embody it himself: “Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.”
“I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death,” he says in section 14 of “Lilacs.” It is not the dead who suffer, but the survivors. In section 15 Whitman makes the subtle and wise distinction between the “knowledge of death,” which walks on one side of him, and the “thought of death close-walking the other side,” producing one of the most magical group portraits in poetry since Dante. The “knowledge of death” is a sacred comfort; the common “thought of death,” one’s own extinction, is an especially unsettling mystery. The poet walks between them, but it is the menacing comrade who comes closest. They are a powerful trio descending into the dark and silent swamp, where the thrush will sing for them the song that the poet lacks the art, or the hubris, to sing himself.
Whitman’s choice of the hermit thrush, the shy “singer bashful and tender,” to represent the poet, to sing “what seem’d the song of death, and a verse for him I love,” underscores Whitman’s resolve to subjugate his own voice. The poet whose exaltation of personality revolutionized the medium of poetry was chastened by his experience in the hospitals. In the War for the Union, and in human suffering, Whitman had found something larger and more important than the vaunting Self in Leaves of Grass. He assured O’Connor that his new book was superior because it was free of the “perturbations” of his earlier works. By this he meant erotic turmoil, certainly; but he also recognized that his war experience had subdued his personal ambitions for fame and distinction. Whitman had not wholly conquered his inner “perturbations.” He would struggle with them all his life. But, as Gay Wilson Allen has written, “one means by which he controlled them in his Drum Taps poems was through the transmutation of his private yearnings for affection into a universal philosophy of love as a social force.” This sublimation is one of the triumphs of Drum-Taps as a whole, and of “Lilacs” as the masterwork of the collection.
The dramatic progress of the poem gives the spotlight to the thrush for the climactic hymn “Come, lovely and soothing Death,” as the poet (in section 17) stands back in awe: “While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, / As to long panoramas of visions.”
The apostrophe to the “western orb, sailing the heaven,” in section 8 of the poem, affectionately recalls Whitman’s personal encounters with the President, particularly during the summer of 1863. “Now I know what you must have meant . . . / As we walk’d in silence in the transparent shadowy night, / As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night, / As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on;) / . . . how full you were of woe . . .” As Whitman personifies Venus, which shone so brilliantly during February and March, he is also recollecting his evening interactions with the President in his carriage on Vermont Avenue, when Lincoln met his gaze and nodded to him, en route to the Soldiers’ Home.
The poem develops an intimacy between Whitman and Lincoln that transcends social contact. The famous dedication in the last stanza, “for the dead I loved so well; / For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands . . .” echoes the diary entry of November 1, 1863 (“his face & manner . . . were inexpressibly sweet”), after Whitman had visited the White House and watched Lincoln through the doorway, thinking, “I love the President personally.” Even on that Halloween, and on other days when he might have been introduced to Lincoln, Whitman hung back in awe and from a keen artistic instinct. As the poem reaches its resolution, joining lilac, star, and thrush with the chant of the poet’s soul, it becomes clear that Lincoln occupied a unique place in Whitman’s cosmos. Some people we see daily, but we never know them. Others we may know more by reputation and aura than by association; yet with these, on the basis of infrequent eye contact, we may feel a spiritual bond. The avatar of Democracy, the Commander-in-Chief, was an almost fantastic blend of the real and the ideal, the semidivine hero and the earthy pioneer. Had Whitman ever become well acquainted with Lincoln it is possible that the love that called his great poem into being, the mastering passion that made him play second fiddle to a thrush, would have been dulled by custom.
No one knows what became of the hundred copies of Drum-Taps that Whitman had ordered bound in April 1865. A few of them arrived in Washington, fittingly, in late May during the days of the Grand Review of the Union armies, another great event of that season. “The long and glittering wide ranks—will they never stop? For two whole days [May 23–24] commencing early in the morning and continuing long into the night,” Whitman wrote in his journal. He informed his mother that he had seen President Johnson, Generals Grant, Meade, and Sherman, and, most important of all, his brother George, marching with his New York regiment.
Mary Lincoln, undone by grief as well as her change in status, chose the first day of the Grand Review to leave Washington. She had stayed in the White House longer than was deemed appropriate, because no one had the temerity to ask her to leave. “I go hence brokenhearted with every hope in life almost crushed,” she said, boarding the train. She could not be persuaded to return to Springfield, which was the only place she could now reasonably afford to live. She had too many enemies there, the widow said. With her sons she took up residence in a Chicago hotel that was far beyond her means.
The Bradstreet Bindery sent out five copies of Drum-Taps to Louisa Whitman, a copy to Emerson, and a bundle that arrived on Whitman’s desk in time for his forty-sixth birthday, May 31. The book was a slender duodecimo, bound in liver-maroon cloth, 4½ by 71/8 inches. On the front was stamped a round medallion Drum Taps in gold leaf, one word below the other in a circle of gold; on the back the same device was blind-stamped. The spine was unmarked. Whitman gave a copy each to William and Nellie O’Connor; and copies to his immediate superior, Assistant Secretary of the Interior William Otto, and to incoming Secretary of the Interior James Harlan. It would have been better not to give a copy to Harlan, thus calling attention to himself and his poetry, which the new Secretary disliked.
Before Lincoln’s death Whitman had prepared a broadside for advertising Drum-Taps, and fifty copies of the broadside were printed for use in bookstores. After April 15, there is no evidence of further promotion. As of 1959, Whitman scholar F. DeWolfe Miller could locate only eighteen copies of Drum-Taps, none of which appeared to have been sent out for review. Miller writes: “Anyone slightly familiar with Whitman’s promotional activities will conclude immediately that he would not have released it for sale without seeing to it that some sort of notices appeared.” It is possible that Whitman reduced the binding order; it is certain that, considering the book inadequate, he quietly, passively suppressed it.
Whitman’s abandonment of the first edition of Drum-Taps appears to coincide with his progress on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and the other poems for the second edition— such poems as “O Captain! My Captain!” and “Spirit Whose Work Is Done.”
At first glance it may seem hard to believe that the poet who wrote “Lilacs” also wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” Yet his letter of March 19, 1863, compares the head of state to a ship’s captain, and doubtless Whitman had seen the newspaper story that the night before the assassination the President dreamed of a ship about to enter port under full sail. Nevertheless, after the sweeping, complex prosody of “Lilacs,” the meter
and rhyme of “O Captain! My Captain!” seem uncharacteristically mechanical, formulaic.
1
O CAPTAIN! my captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
Leave you not the little spot,
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
2
O captain! my captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
O captain! dear father!
This arm I push beneath you;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
3
My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will:
But the ship, the ship is anchor’d safe, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won:
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with silent tread,
Walk the spot my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
This is the original form of the poem as published. In later editions line 6 becomes “O the bleeding drops of red,” line 14 becomes “This arm beneath your head,” and the penultimate verse will read “Walk the deck my Captain lies”—changes for the better.
The author of Leaves of Grass was so much the poetic revolutionary that sometimes one might forget he was a Victorian, with debts to his colleagues across the ocean. The three sections of the piece, and the arrangement of the verses on the page, thinly disguise the very conventional form: it is actually a ballad of nine quatrains rhythmically similar to Coleridge’s stanzas in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” as well as to many of Tennyson’s ballads, including “New Year’s Eve” and “The Talking Oak.”