by Walt Whitman
Lost because of the cleansing process by which nature (as in “Hymn of Dead Soldiers” and “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All”) absorbs the fallen and renews itself. The process is paraphrased and reinterpreted in the next line.
As in “Look Down Fair Moon” (see note 135), an image of the corpse-washing typically done by women in the home. The personification of Death and Night as nursing sisters reverses the traditional figure of the Fates and transposes the personified twin brothers of Homer’s Iliad (XVI:681–82), who treat a fallen warrior with tender care: Sarpedon’s comrades “send him to be wafted away by swift convoy, the twin brothers Sleep and Death” (translation, slightly modified: Andrew Lang).
As noted for “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” coffins were in short supply during the war; an enemy soldier would certainly not have been buried in one. Like “Vigil Strange,” this poem idealizes and ritualizes to bring slaughter within a manageable symbolic framework. Similarly, the appearance of the “white-faced and still” enemy suggests that his body has been embalmed for viewing. During the war the North widely adopted the new practice of embalming to allow the bodies of soldiers to be shipped home (Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 93) and given a decent (symbolically efficacious) burial.
to the leaven’d soil they trod
After the publication of the Sequel, this poem ends all versions of Drum-Taps.
Leaven’d soil: the bitterness of the nation’s disputed soil has been mollified by the resolution of the war and the soil can thus become (as it was destined to be) the “leaven’d soil of the general western world” (line 6). Bread rises when a leavening agent such as yeast induces fermentation in dough. The metaphor of soil as bread, leavened by suffering, sacrifice, and/or blood, ends the volume with yet another secular version of a sacramental image: the body-made-bread of the sacrificed “brother of all” mourned in “A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Grey and Dim.”
The battlefields, “emanative” because the fields will accomplish the purifying chemistry invoked in the immediately preceding “Reconciliation” and elsewhere. The version here also appears in Whitman’s prose collection Specimen Days: “The infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d.)”
The Allegheny Mountains run from Pennsylvania through Maryland and West Virginia to Virginia—the primary territory of the Civil War in the east (from Gettysburg to Richmond). The Mississippi River roughly bisects the continent (unifying east and west) as it flows from the northern to the southern border.
This line identifies the poet with Orpheus, who animated the trees (and creatures) with his song but who is also the preeminent poet of mourning, the mortal who descended to the underworld in search of his lost bride, Eurydice.
The plain of the poems of heroes: the field before the walls of Homer’s Troy, with an echo of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “And drunk delight of battle with my peers, / Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.” Civil War battles were not fought on the plains, though there was plenty of prewar violence in the plains territories of Kansas and Nebraska.
Far-off sea: the Pacific, completing the imaginary crossing of the continent from the eastern to the western border. Sane impalpable air: the medium of nature’s self-cleansing and the fourth wall of the deific square.
Father and son: the last in the series of motifs that (as this flurry of notes attests) Whitman recapitulates in this final poem. The image inverts the death scenes of “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “O Captain! My Captain!,” and “Dirge for Two Veterans” to project a metaphorical and yet again secularized resurrection of the Son by the Father.