Drum Taps
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DRUM-TAPS
BY WALT WHITMAN
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE
EIGHTEEN SIXTY-ONE
BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!
FROM PAUMANOK STARTING I FLY LIKE A BIRD
SONG OF THE BANNER AT DAYBREAK
RISE O DAYS FROM YOUR FATHOMLESS DEEPS
VIRGINIA--THE WEST
CITY OF SHIPS
THE CENTENARIAN'S STORY
CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD
BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE
AN ARMY CORPS ON THE MARCH
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
NOT THE PILOT
YEAR THAT TREMBLED AND REEL'D BENEATH ME
THE WOUND-DRESSER
LONG, TOO LONG AMERICA
GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN
DIRGE FOR TWO VETERANS
OVER THE CARNAGE ROSE PROPHETIC A VOICE
I SAW OLD GENERAL AT BAY
THE ARTILLERYMAN'S VISION
ETHIOPIA SALUTING THE COLOURS
NOT YOUTH PERTAINS TO ME
RACE OF VETERANS
WORLD TAKE GOOD NOTICE
O TAN-FACED PRAIRIE-BOY
LOOK DOWN FAIR MOON
RECONCILIATION
HOW SOLEMN AS ONE BY ONE
AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO
DELICATE CLUSTER
TO A CERTAIN CIVILIAN
LO, VICTRESS ON THE PEAKS
SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE
ADIEU TO A SOLDIER
TURN O LIBERTAD
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:
To the ostent of the senses and eyes [he writes], the influences
which stamp the world's history are wars, uprisings, or downfalls
of dynasties.... These, of course, play their part; yet, it may
be, a single new thought, imagination, abstract principle ... put
in shape by some great literatus, and projected among mankind,
may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the
longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely
political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.
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 facades 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:
Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior
appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea
of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside
acquisition--never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the
test, the emulation--more loftily elevated as head and sample--
than they are on the surface of our Republican States this day.
The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of
the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.
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:
He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as
if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than
other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards. With
his head so poised and the whole man fixed in contemplation of
the interlocutor he seemed to pass into a state of absolute
passivity ... the glassy eyes half closed, the large knotted
hands spread out before him. He resembled, in fact, nothing so
much as "a great old grey Angora Tom," alert in repose, serenely
blinking under his combed waves of hair, with eyes inscrutably
dreaming.... As I stood in dull, deserted Mickle Street once
more, my heart was full of affection for this beautiful old man
... this old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience
and philosophy.
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."
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
"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:
Much of the time he sleeps, or half sleeps.... I often come and
sit by him in perfect silence; he will breathe for ten minutes as
softly and evenly as a young babe asleep. Poor youth, so
handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time
as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, without
the least start awaken'd, open'd his eyes, gave me a long steady
look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier--one long,
clear, silent look--a slight sigh--then turn'd back and went into
his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the
heart of the stranger that hover'd near.
The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening has
never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something,
as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.
The sky dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the
moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that
great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west,
suffused the soul. Then I heard slow and clear the deliberate
notes of a bugle come up out of the silence ... firm and
faithful, floating along, rising, falling leisurely, with here
and there a long-drawn note.... sounding tattoo.
"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:
Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen,
purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.
Or this, called "Reconciliation":
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,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin.
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:
... And I saw askant the armies,
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 left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splintered 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 the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wives and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd....
_Come lovely and soothing death,_
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the night, in the day, 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! praise! 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._
DRUM-TAPS
FIRST O SONGS FOR A PRELUDE.
First O songs for a prelude,
Lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum pride and joy in my city,
How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,
How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,
(O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!
O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than
steel!)
How you sprang--how you threw off the costumes of peace with
indifferent hand,
How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard
in their stead,
How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of
soldiers,)
How Manhattan drum-taps led.
Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading,
Forty years as a pageant, still unawares the lady of this teeming and
turbulent city,
Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,
With her million children around her, suddenly,
At dead of night, at news from the south,
Incens'd struck with clinch'd hand the pavement.
A shock electric, the night sustain'd it,
Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour'd out its myriads.
From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,
Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.
To the drum-taps prompt,
The young men falling in and arming,
The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith's
hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)
The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the
court,
The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing
the reins abruptly down on the horses' backs,
The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all
leaving;
Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm,
The new recruits, even boys, the old men show them how to wear their
accoutrements, they buckle the straps carefully,
Outdoors arming, indoors arming, the flash of the musketbarrels,
The white tents cluster in camps, the arm'd sentries around, the
sunrise cannon and again at sunset,
Arm'd regiments arrive every day, pass through the city, and embark
from the wharves,
(How good they look as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with
their guns on their shoulders!
How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces and
their clothes and knapsacks cover'd with dust!)
The blood of the city up--arm'd! arm'd! the cry everywhere,
The flags flung out from the steeples of churches and from all the
public buildings and stores,
The tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son kisses his
mother,
(Loth is the mother to part, yet not a word does she speak to detain
him,)
The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the
way,
The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their
favorites,
The artillery, the silent cannons bright as gold, drawn along, rumble
lightly over the stones,
(Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence,
Soon unlimber'd to begin the red business;)
All the mutter of preparation, all the determin'd arming,
The hospital service, the lint, bandages and medicines,
The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in earnest, no
mere parade now;
War! an arm'd race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning
away;
War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm'd race is advancing to
welcome it.