DRUM-TAPS
By Walt Whitman
CONTENTS
FROM PAUMANOK STARTING I FLY LIKE A BIRD
SONG OF THE BANNER AT DAYBREAK.
RISE O DAYS FROM YOUR FATHOMLESS DEEPS.
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.
YEAR THAT TREMBLED AND REEL’D BENEATH ME.
GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN.
OVER THE CARNAGE ROSE PROPHETIC A VOICE.
ETHIOPIA SALUTING THE COLOURS.
AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO.
TO THE LEAVEN’D SOIL THEY TROD.
NOTE
The Introduction is reprinted, by permission, from The Times
Literary Supplement of April 1, 1915.
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:
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:
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:
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.”
“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.
The prose of his “Specimen Days,” indeed, is often nearer to poetry than
his verse:
“A steady rain, dark and thick and warm,” he writes again, two days after
Gettysburg. “The cavalry camp is a ceaseless field of observation to me.
This forenoon there stood the horses, tether’d together, dripping,
steaming, chewing their hay. The men emerge from their tents, dripping
also. The fires are half-quench’d.” There is a poetic poise in this brief,
vivid statement, apart from its bare economy of means. It is the lump
awaiting the leaven no less than is “Cavalry Crossing a Ford.” To this
supreme spectator an apple orchard in May, even the White House in
moonlight, no more and no less than these battle-scenes, rendered up their
dignity, life, and beauty, their true human significance. But in
“Drum-Taps” the witness is not always so satisfactory. The secret has
evaporated in the effort to make poetry, or half-consciously to
inject a moral, to play the Universal Bard. There creeps into the words a
tinge of the raw and the grotesque. The poet has the look of a cowboy off
the stage, tanned with grease-paint. But again and again the secret creeps
back and some lovely emanation of poetry is added to it:
Or this, called “Reconciliation”:
The bonds of rhyme shackled him, deprived him of more than freedom. He is
like a wild bird that suddenly perceives the bars of its small cage across
the blue of the sky. And yet the finer his poems are, the nearer they
approach to definite rhythmical design. One has only to compare “O
Captain! my Captain!” with “Hushed be the Camps To-day” to perceive this
curious paradox. They are both of them memories of his beloved Lincoln,
whom he had many times seen, with that peculiarly close and transatlantic
curiosity of his, riding at a jog-trot, on a good-sized, easy-going grey
horse, with his escort of yellow-striped cavalry behind him, through the
streets of Washington—dressed in black, somewhat rusty and dusty,
with a black, stiff hat, almost as ordinary in attire as the commonest
man. That heroic face, too, he had pierced; and caught from it the deep,
subtle, indirect expression, that only the long-gone master-painters of
the Old World could have seized and immortalized. And in yet another
memory of this great American Whitman attains to his best and highest,
“When Lilacs Last in the Doorway Bloom’d.” It is one of the most beautiful
of poems, of the purest intuition, of a consummate, if unconscious,
artistry. Whose voice is it that rings and echoes, now low and tender, now
solemn and desolate, now clear, full, victorious, out of its cloistral
solitude—that of the mourner himself, of all-heedfull, heedless
Nature, of the immortal soul of man, or just a bird, the shy and hidden,
sweet, small hermit thrush? The last division of his life’s work—his
fond Epic, his cosmic “inventory”—as Whitman planned it, was to be
devoted to the chaunting of songs of death and immortality. The soldier to
whom he read of Christ’s Resurrection talked of death to him, and said he
did not fear it. He talked to a man who did not enjoy religion in the way
a Christian means, to whom the mystery of Easter is an all-sufficing
“reliance.” But Whitman not only did not fear death. The thought of it was
to him the strangest of raptures, the reverie of a child dreaming of a
distant mother, soon to come again. Death and immortality were but two
aspects of the same blessed hope to this man, who poured out his life in a
turgid fount of ecstatic joy in living: