Out of that experience in camp and hospital the pieces called "Drum-Taps,"
first published in 1865,--since merged in his "Leaves,"--were produced.
Their descriptions and pictures, therefore, come from life. The vivid
incidents of "The Dresser" are but daguerreotypes of the poet's own actual
movements among the bad cases of the wounded after a battle. The same
personal knowledge runs through "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and
Dim," "Come up from the Fields, Father," etc., etc.
The reader of this section of Whitman's work soon discovers that it is not
the purpose of the poet to portray battles and campaigns, or to celebrate
special leaders or military prowess, but rather to chant the human aspects
of anguish that follow in the train of war. He perhaps feels that the
permanent condition of modern society is that of peace; that war as a
business, as a means of growth, has served its time; and that,
notwithstanding the vast difference between ancient and modern warfare,
both in the spirit and in the means, Homer's pictures are essentially true
yet, and no additions to them can be made. War can never be to us what it
has been to the nations of all ages down to the present; never the main
fact, the paramount condition, tyrannizing over all the affairs of
national and individual life, but only an episode, a passing interruption;
and the poet, who in our day would be as true to his nation and times as
Homer was to his, must treat of it from the standpoint of peace and
progress, and even benevolence. Vast armies rise up in a night and
disappear in a day; a million of men, inured to battle and to blood, go
back to the avocations of peace without a moment's confusion or
delay,--indicating clearly the tendency that prevails.
Apostrophizing the genius of America in the supreme hour of victory, he
says:--
"No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee--nor mastery's rapturous
verse:--
But a little book containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds,
And psalms of the dead."
The collection is also remarkable for the absence of all sectional or
partisan feeling. Under the head of "Reconciliation" are these lines:--
"Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be
utterly lost!
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin."
Perhaps the most noteworthy of Whitman's war poems is the one called "When
Lilacs last in the Door-yard bloomed," written in commemoration of
President Lincoln.
The main effect of this poem is of strong, solemn, and varied music; and
it involves in its construction a principle after which perhaps the great
composers most work,--namely, spiritual auricular analogy. At first it
would seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it, and so indirect. No reference
whatever is made to the mere fact of Lincoln's death; the poet does not
even dwell upon its unprovoked atrocity, and only occasionally is the tone
that of lamentation; but, with the intuitions of the grand art, which is
the most complex when it seems most simple, he seizes upon three beautiful
facts of nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the dead President's
tomb. The central thought is of death, but around this he curiously
twines, first, the early-blooming lilacs which the poet may have plucked
the day the dark shadow came; next the song of the hermit thrush, the most
sweet and solemn of all our songsters, heard at twilight in the dusky
cedars; and with these the evening star, which, as many may remember,
night after night in the early part of that eventful spring, hung low in
the west with unusual and tender brightness. These are the premises whence
he starts his solemn chant.
The attitude, therefore, is not that of being bowed down and weeping
hopeless tears, but of singing a commemorative hymn, in which the voices
of nature join, and fits that exalted condition of the soul which serious
events and the presence of death induce. There are no words of mere
eulogy, no statistics, and no story or narrative; but there are pictures,
processions, and a strange mingling of darkness and light, of grief and
triumph: now the voice of the bird, or the drooping lustrous star, or the
sombre thought of death; then a recurrence to the open scenery of the land
as it lay in the April light, "the summer approaching with richness and
the fields all busy with labor," presently dashed in upon by a spectral
vision of armies with torn and bloody battle-flags, and, again, of the
white skeletons of young men long afterward strewing the ground. Hence the
piece has little or nothing of the character of the usual productions on
such occasions. It is dramatic; yet there is no development of plot, but
a constant interplay, a turning and returning of images and sentiments.
The poet breaks a sprig of lilac from the bush in the door-yard,--the dark
cloud falls on the land,--the long funeral sets out,--and then the
apostrophe:--
"Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop'd flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veiled women,
standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit--with the silent sea of faces, and the
unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong
and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour'd around the coffin,
To dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs--Where amid these you
journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells' perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
"(Nor for you, for one alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring;
For fresh as the morning--thus would I chant a song for you, O sane
and sacred death.
"All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies;
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you, O death.)"