If Walt Whitman isn’t America’s greatest poet, he is certainly very near the top of the short list. At a time when American poets were still writing in forms and idioms imported from England, Whitman created a new poetry, a verse free of rhyme, meter and line length. And the subject matter was highly personal, sometimes extending the boundary of what constituted appropriate taste. But more often he focused on the quality of the American experience and its promises for the future. He heard America singing.
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Born in Long Island in 1819, Whitman left school at eleven and embarked on a series of occupations: printer, schoolteacher, journalist, bookseller, newspaper editor and, oddly, house builder. But he also began on his life’s major endeavor, composing a series of poems that he collected under the name “Leaves of Grass.” First published in 1855 it contained twelve substantial poems; the final edition at the end of his life had nearly four hundred. One of the sections of this opus was called “Drum-Taps.” It was written during and just after the Civil War and is the subject of this column.
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In September of 1861, five months after the firing on Fort Sumter, a patriotic and outspoken Walt Whitman stood up at Pfaff’s Beer Cellar in New York and delivered a new poem, a call to arms that raised the alarm of war.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
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The following year Whitman traveled south to locate his younger brother who had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. While there he watched the painful transport of wounded soldiers to medical facilities in Washington. Whitman had already spent some spare time assisting at military hospitals in New York, and now more than ever he embraced in Washington a role as nurse and comforter of the wounded and dying. He wrote of this explicitly and often graphically in “The Wound-Dresser,” here in excerpts.
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.
I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.
On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.)
I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.
I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)
Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)
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Whitman’s background in journalism and his near-prose narrative style also served him well in describing scenes on the battlefield, as in these two poems.
First: “Cavalry Crossing a Ford.”
A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.
Then “Bivouac on a Mountain Side.”
I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,
And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.
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In 1865, an event that shook the very foundations of the country, the assassination of President Lincoln, brought forth these stanzas from we now recognize as Walt Whitman’s greatest poem.
When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!
In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle……and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.
In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary, the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris;)
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
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-veil’d 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,
The 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.
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After the War, Whitman stayed on in Washington working as a clerk in several government offices. He lost one of his best jobs when the Secretary of the Interior disapproved of the homoeroticism in “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman suffered several strokes and finished his life in Camden, New Jersey, buoyed by ever-increasing celebrations of his poetry and welcome visits from, among others, Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oscar Wilde. Tennyson sent money to help with bills. And the world sent affection and admiration.
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Postscript. Whitman’s influence on future poets was immense, but so was it on composers and artists. His titles alone suggest music: “Song of Myself,” “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” “Song of the Universal.” We know of more than 1200 settings to music of Whitman texts, and the composers include Vaughan Williams, Holst and Delius in England; and in the United States, composers include Ives, Hindemith, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein.
In the visual arts, I would just point to one extraordinary connection. Whitman wrote a series of poems called “From Noon to Starry Night,” which contained such lines as “Thou orb aloft full-dazzling!” and “Prepare my starry nights.” In 1888-89, Vincent Van Gogh was avidly reading and admiring Whitman’s poetry, recommending it to his sister and others. In June of ’89 he produced a world-renowned night-sky painting. Would you like to suggest the name?
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VIDEO. For this video, we took our cameras to the battlefield at Gettysburg, where the First Poetry Quartet is joined by guest Richard Kiley.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: WALT WHITMAN AND THE CIVIL WAR
