by Walt Whitman
others may praise what they like
One of four slave states that did not secede from the Union, Missouri contributed troops to both sides of the Civil War. Missouri was also the epicenter of the prewar conflict over the westward expansion of slavery. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 made it the westernmost slave state until repeal by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which permitted the newly created territories of Kansas and Nebraska to choose whether to be slave or free.
weave in, weave in, my hardy life
Weave in: a compound allusion to the Fates of Greek myth, who spin, measure, and snip the thread of life; to the Norns of Norse myth, who weave the web of destiny; to the cordage of ships; and to weaving of a tapestry, possibly with reference to the tapestry woven by Helen in the Iliad (III:125–29): “She was weaving a great web, / a red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles / of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armored Achaians, / struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god.”
Wiry threads: in weaving nomenclature, threads that have been spun too tightly so that they appear like strands of wire in a finished fabric.
pensive on her dead gazing, i heard the mother of all
Probably a reference to what Whitman called “the bloody promenade of the Wilderness” (“The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” in Specimen Days), a battle fought entirely in the woods (the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, Virginia) on May 5–7, 1864. On May 6, the heavy underbrush caught fire, filling the woods with flames and smoke. Whitman was strongly affected by the Wilderness, in which his brother George fought (and survived). The short unpublished poem “Reminiscences 1864” begins: “I saw the bloody holocaust of the Wilderness & Manassas.”
The triple “precious” establishes the blood as sacramental (Peter 1:18–19) and the process of absorption as a naturalized and secularized Eucharist (see also note 50).
Exhale them: as wholesome air produced by the “last chemistry” by which the earth continuously cleanses itself (see note 120).
sequel to drum-taps
Actually published in October 1865.
when lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d
The “Lilacs” elegy sets the tone for the Sequel it introduces. The ensuing poems are reflections, some personal, some philosophical, on the national experience of the preceding four years. The loose chronology of the first Drum-Taps disappears, replaced by the cyclical return of the elegiac mode: the Sequel ends by interleaving three elegies—“In Clouds Descending,” “Dirge for Two Veterans,” and “Reconciliation”—with poems on the demobilization of the Union armies.
Whitman recalled that when he learned of Lincoln’s assassination, “the season being advanced, there were many lilacs in full bloom. By one of those caprices that enter and give tinge to events without being at all a part of them, I find myself always reminded of the great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms”; see Whitman, Leaves of Grass, edited by Moon, 276, note 2.
Great star: the evening star, i.e., Hesperus, the planet Venus; “great” because it is the brightest star in the sky. Compare Tennyson’s In Memoriam no. 121 (1850): “Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun / And ready, thou, to die with him, / Thou watchest all things ever dim / And dimmer, and a glory done” (lines 1–4).
Compare Shelley’s “Adonais”: “Ah! Woe is me! Winter is come and gone / But grief returns with the revolving year” (lines 154–55). The allusion begins a series of references to pastoral elegy that end by inverting the genre’s traditional pattern of consolation in the “death carol” of section 16 (see note 165).
The “trinity sure” subsequently becomes the lilac, the star, and the song of the thrush, later doubled by the speaker and his two “companions,” the knowledge of death and the thought of death (section 15).
Western, fallen star: the evening star appears in the west; the western twilight traditionally signifies death; Lincoln was from the western state of Illinois. As in “Year of Meteors,” the fate of the heroic leader appears in the heavens.
Late in the morning of April 15, 1865, Whitman walked toward the docks in Brooklyn with his notebook and pencil and wrote, “Lincoln’s death—black, black, black—as you look towards the sky—long broad black like great serpents undulating in every direction”; see Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, edited by Edward F. Geier (New York University Press, 2007), II: 762.
Compare Milton’s “Lycidas”: “Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear, / I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude / And with forc’d fingers rude / Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year” (lines 1–5).
The hermit: “Solitary Thrush…sings oftener after sundown sometimes quite in the night / is very secluded / likes shaded, dark, places in swamps…his song is a hymn…he never sings near the farm houses—never in the settlement / is the bird of the solemn primal woods & of Nature pure & holy”; ibid., 766.
Sings by himself: Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry”: “A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”
Wheat, every grain from its shroud: echoing John 12:24: “Except a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone: but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.”
Between April 21 and May 3, 1865, a special funeral train carried Lincoln’s body from Washington, D.C., through seven states to Springfield, Illinois; burial in Springfield followed on May 4. Newspapers carried timetables so that people could watch as the train passed through 444 communities, stopping at 11 cities for public mourning.
Presented to the coffin, the sprig merges with the golden bough that Virgil’s Aeneas must break from a tree and present to gain passage to the underworld (Aeneid VI:135–55). To enter the Elysian Fields, home of the virtuous dead, including his father, Aeneas places the bough on a gated threshold—the dooryard of Elysium (VI:628–38).
Sane and sacred: reversing elegiac convention, death becomes the source of consolation instead of its occasion. “Sane” here primarily means “healthy in body,” with an overlay of “reasonable,” “sensible”; the context is the volume’s leitmotif of cleansing “chemistry” (see note 120). The sanctifying chant comes in section 16.
“A month before the assassination, on a March evening in Washington, Whitman had been struck by the singular beauty of Venus sinking on the western horizon” (Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 445).
Full...of woe: an echo of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, March 4, 1865: “The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ [Matthew 18:7] If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses…and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”
Perhaps an echo of “Sweet and Low” from Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), folded into one of Whitman’s familiar tropes of transcontinental union: “Sweet and low, sweet and low, / Wind of the western sea, / Low, low, breathe and blow, / Wind of the western sea! / Over the rolling waters go, / Come from the dying moon, and blow, / Blow him again to me” (lines 1–7).
Perfume the grave: add to nature’s purifying chemistry (see note 120) raised to the plane of memory.
Pictures...on the walls: a play on the traditional metaphor of poems as speaking pictures. Whitman correctly assumed that Lincoln’s grave would become a national shrine. The burial house recalls the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, familiar to Whitman from visits to the Egyptian Museum in Manhattan (Gary Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman, rev. ed. [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969], 56-57). The poet symbolically prepares his master for the afterlife, i.e., the continuing life of the nation embodied in its fertile land, its productive cities, and the “pictures” in verse that
envision them.
Human song: an echo of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”: “The still, sad music of humanity, / Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue” (lines 91–93).
“All Broadway is black with mourning—the facades of the houses are festooned with black—great flags with wide and heavy fringes of dead black” (Whitman, Notebooks, II: 763). Also Job 3:5: “Let darkness and the shadow of death stain [that day]; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.”
The dim swamp and shadowy woods suggest the banks of the river Styx (the dark, marshy water across which dead souls are ferried to the underworld) as described by Virgil in the Aeneid (VI:384–416).
The 1876 Leaves italicizes this section under the title “Death Carol”; subsequent editions drop the title but retain the italics. The section is composed in quatrains and thus set apart formally as a ritual chant. The only standard English elegy in quatrains is Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Whitman inverts its gloom.
Voice I know: alluding to “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” first published in 1859 and included under a different title in the 1860 Leaves. Like “Lilacs,” “Cradle” connects mournful birdsong with a meditation on mortality. It concludes with the sea whispering the “strong and delicious” word “death” over and over to the boy who will grow up to become the poet.
Well-veil’d Death: the last of a series of personifications stemming from the end of the second quatrain: first as mother (the shadow of the Mother of All, see note 69), then as “Deliveress” (inverting the gender and action of the Savior, delivering us from life), and here as an avatar of Isis, the supreme goddess of ancient Egypt, a black-veiled statue of whom stood in her shrine at Sais (a city in the Nile delta). According to Plutarch, the shrine bore the inscription, “I am all that has been, is, and will be; no mortal yet has lifted my veil.”
Tally of my soul, with two variants (in sections 19 and 21): “tally” used in the sense of agreeing, harmonizing with, corresponding with. Historically, however, a tally is a notched stick used to keep accounts and split in halves between the parties involved. The tally in this sense corresponds to the poet’s sprig of lilac (note 155) and the war’s broken flagstaffs (note 170).
Eyes unclosed: like those of Saul of Tarsus, becoming Saint Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:18): “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.”
Staffs all splinter’d: an incorporated palinode on the flag-worship that pervades the April 1865 volume. The splintering of the flagstaffs mirrors the breaking of the sprig of lilac.
The countenance is Lincoln’s; it was widely noted at the time how the war had aged his face.
o captain! my captain!
With its nautical imagery this poem (once memorized by generations of American schoolchildren) connects Lincoln’s assassination to the death, in victory, and on the flagship HMS Victory, of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805. Nelson was felled by a musket ball as he stood on deck. His posthumous victory broke Napoleon’s sea power and was thus regarded as having saved the nation, though the Napoleonic Wars would continue for ten more years. Lincoln inherits Nelson’s iconic position as a martyred savior.
The father-son image reverses the situation of “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” an internal reference marked when the speaker in stanza 3 chooses to keep vigil “with silent tread” by his fallen father/captain. The identification of Lincoln as a national father figure was well established, enshrined in the biblical sobriquet “Father Abraham” introduced by James S. Gibbon in a poem published in the New York Evening Post on July 16, 1862, in response to a call for troops: “We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more, / From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore, / We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear, / With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear, / We dare not look behind us, but steadfastly before, / We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.”
spirit whose work is done
In Leaves this poem is subtitled “(Washington City, 1865),” which identifies the occasion as the Grand Review of the Armies, May 23–24, 1865, following the surrender of the last significant Confederate army to remain in the field after Lee’s surrender to Grant, April 9, 1865.
On May 24, Sherman led his two armies, 65,000 strong, through the streets of Washington; the procession took six hours. Accustomed to roughing it, Sherman wanted to make an impression of order and discipline. He prepared by drilling his troops and making sure their buttons shined and bayonets gleamed.
chanting the square deific
Whitman’s square replaces the divine circle, the traditional symbol of cosmic perfection, and the Holy Trinity, the default figure of multiple divine forms “out of the One advancing.”
The four necessary sides correspond to the four primary compass points, with which Whitman associated the deific square in remarks made (albeit late in life) to his amanuensis, Horace Traubel: “It would be hard to give the idea mathematical expression—the idea of spiritual equity—the north, south, east, and west of the constituted universe” (quoted in Whitman, Leaves of Grass, edited by Moon, 371).
Hermes and Hercules share certain traits with Christ: Hermes, the messenger, mediates between the divine and human worlds; Hercules, half god and half human, suffered death by betrayal after completing his epic labors.
This line paraphrases I Corinthians 13:13 but replaces faith with affection: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
Whitman cut this line in 1881, severing the poem’s connection with Drum-Taps and turning it into a general credo rather than one forged by the trials of the war. The future tense suggests that this “wall” of the square has been breached by the war’s relentless assaults on hope and charity. The future impotence of the weapons recalls Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Plotting revolt: Slave rebellions were widely feared in the antebellum South; in the most notorious, Nat Turner and a band of fellow slaves roamed through Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, killing any whites and freeing any slaves they met. John Brown’s epochal 1859 raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, sought to foment a rebellion by arming as many slaves as possible with the stolen weapons. The raid was a debacle, decisively suppressed by federal troops under the leadership, ironically, of Robert E. Lee.
Sudra: the lowest of the four Hindu castes, consisting of servants and menial laborers. The full passage recalls Milton’s Satan: “Dark’n’d so, yet shone / Above them all th’ Archangel; but his face / Deep scars of thunder had intrench’d, and care / Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows / Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride / Waiting revenge” (Paradise Lost I:599–604).
Part 3, lines 1–5: the only direct consideration of slavery in Drum-Taps, displaced when Whitman cut the poem from the Leaves version and added “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.” Farther down, the association of the defiant slave with Satan is heroic, not accusatory, echoing Shelley’s famous claim, in “A Defence of Poetry,” that Milton’s Satan is morally superior to his God: “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil.” See also the similar passage in the 1855 Leaves that begins: “Now Lucifer was not dead.”
Santa SPIRITA: a feminized form of Spirito Sancto, Italian for “Holy Spirit”; Whitman transfers the epithet to personify the source of life.
General Soul: the line loosely paraphrases Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul” (1841): “We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the t
ree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.” Emerson defines the Over-Soul as “that Unity...within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other”; available at http://www.emersoncentral.com/oversoul.htm.
i heard you, solemn-sweet pipes of the organ
The first of four consecutive short poems referring to the war metaphorically or not at all; none appears in the Leaves “Drum-Taps.” The sequence traces a crisis of self-reproach resolved in the subsequent “As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap, Camerado,” making the affections of the war the template for those of peace and allowing Whitman to resume—the word is his—his poetic vocation.
this day, o soul
Whitman removed this poem from Drum-Taps after 1867 and cut it from Leaves in 1881.
The Pauline glass through which one sees darkly before rebirth in Christ: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (I Corinthians 13:12). Whitman’s secularized version clears the mirror to show not the world beyond but the real world in all its detail.
dirge for two veterans
Like “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” this father-son elegy combines naturalistic detail (the street scene, the drums and bugles) with phantasmagoria (Sunday-night burial by moonlight with full military honors, the maternal moon). The “sad procession” is a stream of mental images (see note 30).
Dead-march: more properly “Dead March,” the popular name for the funeral march from Handel’s 1738 oratorio Saul. The music, punctuated throughout by drum taps, is an instrumental dirge for King Saul and his son Jonathan, both fallen in battle against the Philistines (I Samuel 31).