by Walt Whitman
The popular image of the pioneers as settlers of the western frontier stems primarily from the postbellum era; hence in 1871 and 1876 Whitman moved this poem to a Leaves group, “Marches Now That the War Is Over,” later dismantled (Whitman, Leaves of Grass, edited by Moon, 192). The legal basis of pioneering in the west, however, was the Homestead Act of 1862 governing settlements on federal land west of the Mississippi River. The act allowed those over twenty-one, including freed slaves, to file a claim for a land grant after five years of residence. Applicants had to show proof that they had improved the land and never taken up arms against the government. The popular use of pioneer derives in part from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel, The Pioneers, set in the western frontier of New York in the 1790s.
Compare “Broad-Axe Poem” (1856; later “Song of the Broad Axe”) in Leaves: The ax, a symbol of the epic labor of clearing the wilderness, is a weapon here because the pioneers form a metaphorical army.
Beyond the seas: in the failed European revolutions of 1848, which for Whitman confirmed that the destiny of democracy rested with America alone. See “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” (in 1860: “To a Foiled Revolter or Revoltress”) in Leaves.
Primeval forests: an ironic echo of the famous opening of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s long poem Evangeline (1847): “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock.” Evangline recounts the forced migration of the Acadians (francophone colonists) from eastern Canada—the antithesis of the heroic migration of Whitman’s pioneers.
Colorado straddles the Continental Divide, the natural boundary east of which waters flow toward the Atlantic Ocean and west of which they flow toward the Pacific. The state was home to the largest gold rush in American history (1858–61) and thus a pivotal site of westward movement.
All the hands: a prediction that settlement of the west will reunite the nation by supplying what military victory could not: a common purpose and common destiny. Whitman accordingly transfers military imagery to the pioneers in the central stanzas (11–15) and more diffusely through the poem’s genre as a marching song.
The reference to masters and slaves is puzzling. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in January 1865; although ratification took until December, the end of slavery was a virtual certainty. Yet Whitman never changed the line. Its exact date of composition is unknown.
The trumpet call is a military reveille; its invocation completes the running metaphor of the “race” of pioneers as an army on the march. Placed at the close, the invocation also echoes the closing stanza of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), which bids the wind to be “through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy” (lines 68–69).
the dresser
Later “The Wound-Dresser,” this poem draws its clinical details and tone of eroticized compassion from Whitman’s wartime experience as a hospital nurse. The speaker is a fictional composite, both dresser and soldier. “The Dresser” is one of several Drum-Taps poems whose speaker recollects the war from a future still remote when the poem was written. The old wound dresser is both a quasi-biblical figure of patriarchal wisdom and a village storyteller whose oral testimony of the war, transcribed as poetry, survives both his own approaching death and the deaths of the war’s combatants.
A counterstatement to Longfellow’s sententious, once-famous lines from “A Psalm of Life” (1838): “Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime, / And, departing, leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time.”
Here and below (“open, doors of time!”), the doors recall Job 38:17: “Have the gates of death been opened to thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?”
Conjoined with “the world of gain and appearance,” above, an allusion to Peter 1:18–19: “Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold...but with the precious blood of Christ.” Here, as throughout, Whitman portrays scenes of carnage as reenactments of Calvary in which compassion takes the place of redemption.
Soothing hand: The German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) theorized that an invisible vital fluid pervades all animal bodies. A healer can repair disturbances in this “animal magnetism” by passing his hands a few inches above the sufferer’s body from the head downward and then shaking away the “diseased magnetism.” Mesmerism flourished in America during much of the nineteenth century. Whitman was a firm believer; mesmeric imagery appears throughout his writings.
when i heard the learn’d astronomer
Whitman removed this famous poem from Drum-Taps in the 1871 Leaves. Its original placement has less to do with its overt theme than with its turn to the starry sky, anticipating “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” and “Bivouac on a Mountain Side.” The learned astronomer was Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel (1809–62), whose A Course of Six Lectures on Astronomy (1848) Whitman had read and whom he may have heard lecture in New York in 1859.
rise o days from your fathomless deeps
The literal lightning of stanza 1 merges here with the metaphorical lightning of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), one of the North’s most popular war songs. The song combines William Steffe’s melody for the slightly earlier “John Brown’s Body” with lyrics by Julia Ward Howe: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; / He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: / His truth is marching on.”
Vengeful stroke: continues the incorporation of imagery from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
The serpent also appears in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” verse 3: “I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: / ‘As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal’; / Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, / Since God is marching on.” Howe’s serpent and Whitman’s nemesis allude to Genesis 3:14–15, God’s curse on the serpent after the Fall: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
beat! beat! drums!
Summoned to shake the dead, the military bugles framing each stanza echo the seven trumpets of the apocalypse in Revelation 8, 9, and 11. See especially 11:18: “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou…shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.” The trumpets also echo “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (see note), verse 4: “He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat.”
come up from the fields father
Despite its title and first line, this poem centers on the mother. It draws largely on the aesthetics of public grief prominent in the popular poetry and especially the popular songs of the Civil War. The idealized figure of the loving mother dominates this tradition, particularly in the North. A sampling of song titles includes “Who Will Care for Mother Now?,” “Mother, Is the Battle Over?,” “On the Field of Battle, Mother,” and the highly popular “Just Before the Battle, Mother” by G.F. Root. “Come Up from the Fields Father” retains the characteristic appeal to sentiment and mother love but inverts the idea that grief is edifying; the mother in this poem is destroyed by it. She can neither give nor receive comfort; her suffering has no religious import; and she is estranged from the fertility of the land that, as an incarnation of the mythic figure Whitman calls the Mother of All, she would otherwise embody.
In Leaves, “Come Up from the Fields Father” immediately precedes “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”; the two poems form a pietà-like pair with emphasis, respectively, on maternal and paternal grief. The original Drum-Taps separates the paired poems with two others, one (“City of Ships”) accepting the tragic costs of war, the other (“Mother and Babe”) restoring the maternal-pastoral bliss disrupted by the arrival of the fatal letter at the Ohio farm. The insertions were probably made to save space in the 1865 volume, b
ut with evident care to link the two elegies for lost sons.
The pastoral imagery derives from the Song of Solomon: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste” (2:3). “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love” (2:5). “The fig tree putteth forth her green leaves, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away” (2:13). Whitman changes the season from rising spring to declining autumn and shifts the love of Sheba for Solomon to the love of the mother for her Pete, whose death will indeed make her “sick of love,” insensible to comfort from either flagons or apples. The biblical frame turns the pastoral bond with the land into a sacred covenant that the war despoils.
The bees restore Virgil’s image of the hive as a model of cooperative labor and social harmony, previously disrupted by the angry swarm of the opening poem. But the silence of the “lately buzzing” bees ominously prefigures that of the lost son—the true message of the letter, in which a “strange hand” has signed Pete’s name.
Neither the Union nor the Confederacy assumed responsibility for informing families of the deaths of soldiers; a letter from a stranger was often the only source of news. As a hospital volunteer Whitman wrote hundreds of such letters for the sick, the wounded, the dying, and the dead. His language often resembles the language here: “Who knows whether he is not better off, that patient & sweet young soul, to go, than we are to stay?”; Roy Morris Jr., Walt Whitman in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 130.
The disruption of a pastoral idyll by sudden death is an age-old trope, often associated with the Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” (I too am in Arcadia) after the title of Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting showing of a group of shepherds pondering a large tombstone (1637–38). Whitman prefigures the intrusion of death on the homestead in the preceding “Beat! Beat! Drums!”: “Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his grain…Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties.”
The only son: Like the crosspiece on the tree in “As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods” and the revelation of the third soldier’s face in “A Sight in Camp on the Day-Break Grey and Dim,” this detail assimilates the death of the soldier to the sacrifice of Christ. “Come Up from the Fields Father” thus forms a Stabat Mater (a hymn to Mary as the mourner of her son), but in a secularized, even clinical form that abjures religious consolation.
city of ships
The city of ships is Manhattan, the “Lady of Ships” of the opening poem.
Black ships: a Homeric epithet used in the Iliad for the Greek warships besieging Troy. It also appears in “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” and “Year of Meteors.”
In 1865 New York Harbor was the busiest port in the United States and the center of the nation’s international commerce. The harbor was fortified during the Civil War.
All races: In nineteenth-century usage, “race” could designate any national, regional, linguistic, or ethnic group. Since the mid-1850s, immigration debates had focused primarily on German and Irish Catholics, whose rising numbers sparked intense nativist hostility and the brief ascendancy of the pro-temperance, antislavery, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party (1855–56).
Before April 1861, New York City was a center of pro-Southern sentiment fomented by the Copperheads who preferred secession to war. In January the Copperhead mayor, Fernando Wood, proposed that New York secede from the Union, declare itself a free city, and maintain trade with the South. Whitman enjoins New York to reject all political models inconsistent with the Revolutionary ideals of liberty and union.
mother and babe
The mother in this nativity scene anticipates the mythic figure named in “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All” and “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice”: the Mother of All, a personification combining maternal love with the fertility of the American soil.
vigil strange i kept on the field one night
Vigil strange: Nocturnal vigils for the dead, ending with burial in the morning, were a domestic ritual in nineteenth-century America.
The “fragrant silent night” anticipates the nocturnal scene of the “Lilacs” elegy, which pointedly separates its “transparent shadowy” night from the battlefield. The vigil here belongs more to the mystic’s dark night of the soul than to the typical Civil War battlefield after a clash. The mass of unburied bodies produced a terrible stench widely noted at the time—in Drum-Taps the battlefield “fœtor” in “Hymn of Dead Soldiers.”
A vigil combines wakefulness (the meaning of the Latin vigilia) and watchfulness; the speaker strictly observes both, passing long hours gazing with his chin in his hands—the classical pose of thought too deep for words.
Blankets often served as shrouds during the Civil War in the absence of coffins, which were scarce and typically reserved for officers; see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2009). The speaker wraps and buries the body with ritual care to perpetuate the symbolic father-son bond and to spare the fallen son’s body from the routine indignity of burial after battle. Burial details, often the work of prisoners, were waste disposal. Even when the dead were allotted individual graves rather than buried en masse in trenches (see “In Clouds Descending, in Midnight Sleep”), their graves often lacked markers—the case here. The speaker compensates for the loss of his comrade/son’s name by burying the boy where he fell, thus consecrating the ground.
bathed in war’s perfume
Probably the U.S. flag lowered at Fort Sumter, which was displayed at the Great Sumter Rally (see note 15).
A beautiful woman inspiring men to board warships suggests Helen of Troy, Christopher Marlowe’s “face that launched a thousand ships” (Doctor Faustus, xiii, line 88). The otherwise strange personification of the flag as a woman comports with the numerous feminine personifications in Drum-Taps, including Manhattan as “Lady of Ships” (“Drum-Taps”); the reference to Helen fits with the recurrent allusion to the Iliad’s “black ships.” The image may also recall Marianne, the revolutionary personification of the French Republic and symbol of Liberty.
The repetition of “tramp” recalls the first chorus of George F. Root’s song “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” in which Northern prisoners of war anticipate being freed by their flag-bearing comrades: “Tramp! tramp! tramp! / The boys are marching. / Cheer up comrades, / They will come. / And beneath the starry flag / We shall breathe the air again / Of the free land in our own beloved home.” The song was so popular during the Civil War that it was adopted with different lyrics by the Confederates.
a march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown
This poem begins, and ends, by loosely paraphrasing the opening of Dante’s Inferno, which Whitman would have known in the translation by H.F. Cary: “In the midway of this our mortal life, / I found me in a gloomy wood, astray / Gone from the path direct.” Whitman elsewhere wrote that his hospital experiences exceeded Dante’s: “Not Virgil showing Dante on and on amid the agonized & dammed, approach what here I see and take a part in”; see Walt Whitman, Selected Letters of Walt Whitman, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 52.
The details in this poem derive from a hospital notebook Whitman kept during 1863–64. The date and the severity of the loss suggest that the battle involved is Chancellorsville, usually regarded as Robert E. Lee’s greatest tactical victory.
Churches often served as makeshift hospitals, with boards laid over the pews to serve as floors.
The converted church becomes a hellmouth, echoing Dante’s Inferno (“For certain on the brink / I found me of the lamentable vale.../...Dark and deep, / And thick with clouds o’erspread, mine eye in vain / Explor’d its bottom, nor could aught discern”; IV:6–11, Cary translation) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (�
�from those flames / No light; but rather darkness visible / Served only to discover sights of woe, / Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where /...torture without end / Still urges”; I:62–68).
The lily is a traditional symbol of feminine chastity, purity, and beauty; juxtaposed with blood, the image suggests a reverse-gender deflowering of the virginal youngster by the shot to the abdomen. Recalling the “wound in the side” of “The Dresser” and the third face of “A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Grey and Dim,” the line may also echo verse 5 of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (see note 53): “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea;.../As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
Ether: first used as an anesthetic in 1842. Chloroform was preferred but often unavailable; surgery without anesthetic was common.
Steel instruments: for amputation, the war’s commonest medical procedure.
a sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim
Whitman saw this in December 1862 at a hospital encampment in Falmouth, Virginia, where he had traveled from New York to find his brother George, a Union soldier in the battle at nearby Fredericksburg. George survived the battle, a rout of the Union army with heavy casualties. Whitman’s decision to become a hospital volunteer was a direct result of this visit.
The three forms, the third subsequently said to have “the face of the Christ himself,” identify the scene as a Calvary without crosses. The bodies stretched on the ground mark the pathos of a secularized crucifixion that bears no hint of resurrection despite being touched by the divine (see note).
Who are you: a rhetorical and metaphysical question, but also a literal one. Neither Union nor Confederate soldiers carried standard forms of identification; unless a fallen soldier had personally sewn a name tag into his uniform or pinned a scrap of paper to it, his body would probably never be identified.