Complete Prose Works

W >> Walt Whitman >> Complete Prose Works

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55

THE MILLION DEAD, TOO, SUMM'D UP

The dead in this war--there they lie, strewing the fields and
woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south--Virginia,
the Peninsula--Malvern hill and Fair Oaks--the banks of the
Chickahominy--the terraces of Fredericksburgh--Antietam
bridge--the grisly ravines of Manassas--the bloody promenade of the
Wilderness--the varieties of the _strayed_ dead, (the estimate of the
War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill'd in battle and never
buried at all, 5,000 drown'd--15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the
march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities--2,000 graves cover'd
by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away
by caving-in of banks, &c.,)--Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest
--Vicksburgh--Chattanooga--the trenches of Petersburgh--the
numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere--the crop reap'd by
the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations--and blackest
and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the
prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante's
pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments,
excell'd those prisons)--the dead, the dead, the dead--_our_ dead--or
South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)--or East
or West--Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley--somewhere they
crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of
hills--(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach'd bones,
tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found
yet)--our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us--the
son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend
from the dear friend--the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the
Carolinas, and in Tennessee--the single graves left in the woods or by
the roadside, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)--the corpses floated
down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down
the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee,
following Gettysburgh)--some lie at the bottom of the sea--the general
million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States--the
infinite dead--(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their
impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and
shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn,
and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)--not only
Northern dead leavening Southern soil--thousands, aye tens of
thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.

And everywhere among these countless graves--everywhere in the many
soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe,
over seventy of them)--as at the time in the vast trenches, the
depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great
battles--not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but
radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land--we see, and
ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses,
to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word UNKNOWN.

(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At
Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the
unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A
national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark
the spot--but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly
commemorate that spot?)

THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER GET IN THE BOOKS

And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been, or
may be, to others--to me the main interest I found, (and still, on
recollection, find,) in the rank and file of the armies, both sides,
and in those specimens amid the hospitals, and even the dead on the
field. To me the points illustrating the latent personal character
and eligibilities of these States, in the two or three millions of
American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in those
armies--and especially the one-third or one-fourth of their number,
stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the
contest--were of more significance even than the political interests
involved. (As so much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how
it stands personal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions
under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, we
get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more formal
history.)

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal
background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official
surface-courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of
the Secession war; and it is best they should not--the real war will
never get in the books. In the mushy influences of current times, too,
the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger
of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch'd by the side of a
sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have
seen his eyes flash and burn as he raised himself and recurr'd to the
cruelties on his surrender'd brother, and mutilations of the
corpse afterward. (See in the preceding pages, the incident at
Upperville--the seventeen kill'd as in the description, were left
there on the ground. After they dropt dead, no one touch'd them--all
were made sure of, however. The carcasses were left for the citizens
to bury or not, as they chose.)

Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior
history will not only never be written--its practicality, minutia; of
deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier
of 1862-'65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible
dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce
friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality,
lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say,
will never be written--perhaps must not and should not be.

The preceding notes may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life,
and into those lurid interiors, never to be fully convey'd to the
future. The hospital part of the drama from '61 to '65, deserves
indeed to be recorded. Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden
and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments
of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable
campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green
armies, the drafts and bounties--the immense money expenditure, like a
heavy-pouring constant rain--with, over the whole land, the last three
years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning-wail of women,
parents, orphans--the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army
Hospitals--(it seem'd sometimes as if the whole interest of the land,
North and South, was one vast central hospital, and all the rest of
the affair but flanges)--those forming the untold and unwritten history
of the war--infinitely greater (like life's) than the few scraps and
distortions that are ever told or written. Think how much, and of
importance, will be--how much, civic and military, has already been
--buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.

AN INTERREGNUM PARAGRAPH

Several years now elapse before I resume my diary. I continued at
Washington working in the Attorney-General's department through '66
and '67, and some time afterward. In February '73 I was stricken down
by paralysis, gave up my desk, and migrated to Camden, New Jersey,
where I lived during '74 and '75, quite unwell--but after that began
to grow better; commenc'd going for weeks at a time, even for months,
down in the country, to a charmingly recluse and rural spot along
Timber creek, twelve or thirteen miles from where it enters the
Delaware river. Domicil'd at the farm-house of my friends, the
Staffords, near by, I lived half the time along this creek and its
adjacent fields and lanes. And it is to my life here that I, perhaps,
owe partial recovery (a sort of second wind, or semi-renewal of the
lease of life) from the prostration of 1874-'75. If the notes of that
outdoor life could only prove as glowing to you, reader dear, as the
experience itself was to me. Doubtless in the course of the
following, the fact of invalidism will crop out, (I call myself _a
half-Paralytic_ these days, and reverently bless the Lord it is no
worse,) between some of the lines--but I get my share of fun and
healthy hours, and shall try to indicate them. (The trick is, I find,
to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of
negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.)

NEW THEMES ENTERED UPON

_1876, '77_.--I find the woods in mid-May and early June my best
places for composition.[9] Seated on logs or stumps there, or resting
on rails, nearly all the following memoranda have been jotted down.
Wherever I go, indeed, winter or summer, city or country, alone at
home or traveling, I must take notes--(the ruling passion strong in
age and disablement, and even the approach of--but I must not say it
yet.) Then underneath the following excerpta--crossing the _t's_ and
dotting the _i's_ of certain moderate movements of late years--I am
fain to fancy the foundations of quite a lesson learn'd. After you
have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality,
love, and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or
permanently wear--what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from
their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open
air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons--the sun by day and
the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions.
Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may
seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to
drink. But that is part of our lesson.

Dear, soothing, healthy, restoration-hours--after three confining
years of paralysis--after the long strain of the war, and its wounds
and death.

Note:

[9] Without apology for the abrupt change of field and
atmosphere--after what I have put in the preceding fifty or sixty
pages--temporary episodes, thank heaven!--I restore my book to the
bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only
permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.

Who knows, (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now
ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of
bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes falling fresh
and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or
workwoman?--or may-be in sick-room or prison--to serve as cooling
breeze, or Nature's aroma, to some fever'd mouth or latent pulse.

ENTERING A LONG FARM-LANE

As every man has his hobby-liking, mine is for a real farm-lane fenced
by old chestnut-rails gray-green with dabs of moss and lichen, copious
weeds and briers growing in spots athwart the heaps of stray-pick' d
stones at the fence bases--irregular paths worn between, and horse and
cow tracks--all characteristic accompaniments marking and scenting
the neighborhood in their seasons--apple-tree blossoms in forward
April--pigs, poultry, a field of August buckwheat, and in another the
long flapping tassels of maize--and so to the pond, the expansion of
the creek, the secluded-beautiful, with young and old trees, and such
recesses and vistas.

TO THE SPRING AND BROOK

So, still sauntering on, to the spring under the willows--musical as
soft clinking glasses-pouring a sizeable stream, thick as my neck,
pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like
a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth-roof--gurgling, gurgling
ceaselessly--meaning, saying something, of course (if one could only
translate it)--always gurgling there, the whole year through--never
giving out--oceans of mint, blackberries in summer--choice of light
and shade--just the place for my July sun-baths and water-baths
too--but mainly the inimitable soft sound-gurgles of it, as I sit
there hot afternoons. How they and all grow into me, day after
day--everything in keeping--the wild, just-palpable perfume, and the
dappled leaf-shadows, and all the natural-medicinal, elemental-moral
influences of the spot.

Babble on, O brook, with that utterance of thine! I too will express
what I have gather'd in my days and progress, native, subterranean,
past--and now thee. Spin and wind thy way--I with thee, a little
while, at any rate. As I haunt thee so often, season by season, thou
knowest, reckest not me, (yet why be so certain? who can tell?)--but
I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee--receive, copy, print from
thee.

AN EARLY SUMMER REVEILLE

Away then to loosen, to unstring the divine bow, so tense, so long.
Away, from curtain, carpet, sofa, book--from "society"--from city
house, street, and modern improvements and luxuries--away to the
primitive winding, aforementioned wooded creek, with its untrimm'd
bushes and turfy banks--away from ligatures, tight boots, buttons,
and the whole cast-iron civilized life--from entourage of artificial
store, machine, studio, office, parlor--from tailordom and fashion's
clothes--from any clothes, perhaps, for the nonce, the summer heats
advancing, there in those watery, shaded solitudes. Away, thou soul,
(let me pick thee out singly, reader dear, and talk in perfect
freedom, negligently, confidentially,) for one day and night at least,
returning to the naked source-life of us all--to the breast of the
great silent savage all-acceptive Mother. Alas! how many of us are
so sodden--how many have wander'd so far away, that return is almost
impossible.

But to my jottings, taking them as they come, from the heap, without
particular selection. There is little consecutiveness in dates. They
run any time within nearly five or six years. Each was carelessly
pencilled in the open air, at the time and place. The printers will
learn this to some vexation perhaps, as much of their copy is from
those hastily-written first notes.

BIRDS MIGRATING AT MIDNIGHT

Did you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing
through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies, changing
their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be
forgotten. A friend called me up just after 12 last night to mark the
peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating north (rather
late this year.) In the silence, shadow and delicious odor of the
hour, (the natural perfume belonging to the night alone,) I thought it
rare music. You could _hear_ the characteristic motion--once or twice
"the rush of mighty wings," but often a velvety rustle, long drawn
out--sometimes quite near--with continual calls and chirps, and some
song-notes. It all lasted from 12 till after 3. Once in a while the
species was plainly distinguishable; I could make out the bobolink,
tanager, Wilson's thrush, white-crown'd sparrow, and occasionally from
high in the air came the notes of the plover.

BUMBLE-BEES

May-month--month of swarming, singing, mating birds--the bumble-bee
month--month of the flowering lilac-(and then my own birth-month.) As
I jot this paragraph, I am out just after sunrise, and down towards
the creek. The lights, perfumes, melodies--the blue birds, grass birds
and robins, in every direction--the noisy, vocal, natural concert.
For undertones, a neighboring wood-pecker tapping his tree, and the
distant clarion of chanticleer. Then the fresh-earth smells--the
colors, the delicate drabs and thin blues of the perspective. The
bright green of the grass has receiv'd an added tinge from the last
two days' mildness and moisture. How the sun silently mounts in the
broad clear sky, on his day's journey! How the warm beams bathe all,
and come streaming kissingly and almost hot on my face.

A while since the croaking of the pond-frogs and the first white of
the dog-wood blossoms. Now the golden dandelions in endless profusion,
spotting the ground everywhere. The white cherry and pear-blows--the
wild violets, with their blue eyes looking up and saluting my feet, as
I saunter the wood-edge--the rosy blush of budding apple-trees--the
light-clear emerald hue of the wheat-fields--the darker green of the
rye--a warm elasticity pervading the air--the cedar-bushes
profusely deck'd with their little brown apples--the summer fully
awakening--the convocation of black birds, garrulous flocks of them,
gathering on some tree, and making the hour and place noisy as I sit
near.

_Later._--Nature marches in procession, in sections, like the corps of
an army. All have done much for me, and still do. But for the last two
days it has been the great wild bee, the humble-bee, or "bumble," as
the children call him. As I walk, or hobble, from the farm-house down
to the creek, I traverse the before-mention'd lane, fenced by old
rails, with many splits, splinters, breaks, holes, &c., the choice
habitat of those crooning, hairy insects. Up and down and by and
between these rails, they swarm and dart and fly in countless myriads.
As I wend slowly along, I am often accompanied with a moving cloud
of them. They play a leading part in my morning, midday or sunset
rambles, and often dominate the landscape in a way I never before
thought of--fill the long lane, not by scores or hundreds only, but by
thousands. Large and vivacious and swift, with wonderful momentum
and a loud swelling, perpetual hum, varied now and then by something
almost like a shriek, they dart to and fro, in rapid flashes, chasing
each other, and (little things as they are,) conveying to me a new and
pronounc'd sense of strength, beauty, vitality and movement. Are they
in their mating season? or what is the meaning of this plenitude,
swiftness, eagerness, display? As I walk'd, I thought I was follow'd
by a particular swarm, but upon observation I saw that it was a rapid
succession of changing swarms, one after another.

As I write, I am seated under a big wild-cherry tree--the warm day
temper'd by partial clouds and a fresh breeze, neither too heavy nor
light--and here I sit long and long, envelop'd in the deep musical
drone of these bees, flitting, balancing, darting to and fro about me
by hundreds--big fellows with light yellow jackets, great glistening
swelling bodies, stumpy heads and gauzy wings--humming their
perpetual rich mellow boom. (Is there not a hint in it for a musical
composition, of which it should be the back-ground? some bumble-bee
symphony?) How it all nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed; the
open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards. The last two days have
been faultless in sun, breeze, temperature and everything; never two
more perfect days, and I have enjoy'd them wonderfully. My health is
somewhat better, and my spirit at peace. (Yet the anniversary of the
saddest loss and sorrow of my life is close at hand.)

Another jotting, another perfect day: forenoon, from 7 to 9, two
hours envelop'd in sound of bumble-bees and bird-music. Down in
the apple-trees and in a neighboring cedar were three or four
russet-back'd thrushes, each singing his best, and roulading in ways I
never heard surpass'd. Two hours I abandon myself to hearing them,
and indolently absorbing the scene. Almost every bird I notice has a
special time in the year--sometimes limited to a few days--when
it sings its best; and now is the period of these russet-backs.
Meanwhile, up and down the lane, the darting, droning, musical
bumble-bees. A great swarm again for my entourage as I return home,
moving along with me as before.

As I write this, two or three weeks later, I am sitting near the brook
under a tulip tree, 70 feet high, thick with the fresh verdure of its
young maturity--a beautiful object--every branch, every leaf perfect.
From top to bottom, seeking the sweet juice in the blossoms, it swarms
with myriads of these wild bees, whose loud and steady humming makes
an undertone to the whole, and to my mood and the hour. All of which I
will bring to a close by extracting the following verses from Henry A.
Beers's little volume:

As I lay yonder in tall grass
A drunken bumble-bee went past

Delirious with honey toddy.
The golden sash about his body
Scarce kept it in his swollen belly
Distent with honeysuckle jelly.
Rose liquor and the sweet-pea wine
Had fill' d his soul with song divine;
Deep had he drunk the warm night through,
His hairy thighs were wet with dew.
Full many an antic he had play'd
While the world went round through sleep and shade.
Oft had he lit with thirsty lip
Some flower-cup's nectar'd sweets to sip,
When on smooth petals he would slip,
Or over tangled stamens trip,
And headlong in the pollen roll'd,
Crawl out quite dusted o'er with gold;
Or else his heavy feet would stumble
Against some bud, and down he'd tumble
Amongst the grass; there lie and grumble
In low, soft bass--poor maudlin bumble!

CEDAR-APPLES

As I journey'd to-day in a light wagon ten or twelve miles through the
country, nothing pleas'd me more, in their homely beauty and novelty
(I had either never seen the little things to such advantage, or had
never noticed them before) than that peculiar fruit, with its profuse
clear-yellow dangles of inch-long silk or yarn, in boundless profusion
spotting the dark green cedar bushes--contrasting well with their
bronze tufts--the flossy shreds covering the knobs all over, like a
shock of wild hair on elfin pates. On my ramble afterward down by
the creek I pluck'd one from its bush, and shall keep it. These
cedar-apples last only a little while however, and soon crumble and
fade.

SUMMER SIGHTS AND INDOLENCIES

_June 10th_.--As I write, 5-1/2 P.M., here by the creek, nothing can
exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy
shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day;
and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable
skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling
silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees
in fulness of tender foliage--liquid, reedy, long-drawn notes of
birds--based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the
pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching
the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over
and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They
pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund
downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds--and then off
they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near
me I can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white
necks.

SUNDOWN PERFUME--QUAILNOTES--THE HERMIT-THRUSH

_June 19th, 4 to 6-1/2, P.M._--Sitting alone by the creek--solitude
here, but the scene bright and vivid enough--the sun shining, and
quite a fresh wind blowing (some heavy showers last night,) the grass
and trees looking their best--the clare-obscure of different greens,
shadows, half-shadows, and the dappling glimpses of the water, through
recesses--the wild flageolet-note of a quail near by--the just-heard
fretting of some hylas down there in the pond--crows cawing in the
distance--a drove of young hogs rooting in soft ground near the oak
under which I sit--some come sniffing near me, and then scamper away,
with grunts. And still the clear notes of the quail--the quiver of
leaf-shadows over the paper as I write--the sky aloft, with white
clouds, and the sun well declining to the west--the swift darting of
many sand-swallows coming and going, their holes in a neighboring
marl-bank--the odor of the cedar and oak, so palpable, as evening
approaches--perfume, color, the bronze-and-gold of nearly ripen'd
wheat--clover-fields, with honey-scent--the well-up maize, with long
and rustling leaves--the great patches of thriving potatoes, dusky
green, fleck'd all over with white blossoms--the old, warty, venerable
oak above me--and ever, mix'd with the dual notes of the quail, the
soughing of the wind through some near-by pines.

As I rise for return, I linger long to a delicious song-epilogue (is
it the hermit-thrush?) from some bushy recess off there in the swamp,
repeated leisurely and pensively over and over again. This, to the
circle-gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in
the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel.

A JULY AFTER-NOON BY THE POND

The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air--the
white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the
glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the
picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of
some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous
silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover
near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to
examine, find nothing, and away they go)--the vast space of the sky
overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in
majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two
large slate-color'd dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and
darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their
wings quivering all the time, (are they not showing off for my
amusement?)--the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the
water snakes--occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his
shoulders, as he darts slantingly by--the sounds that bring out the
solitude, warmth, light and shade--the quawk of some pond duck--(the
crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the
song of the first cicadas;)--then at some distance the rattle and
whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk
through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek--(what was the
yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and
long-stretch'd legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over
there through the trees?)--the prevailing delicate, yet palpable,
spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all,
encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky,
transparent and blue--and hovering there in the west, a mass of
white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"--the
sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading,
expanding--a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum--yet may-be the most
real reality and formulator of everything--who knows?