Drum Taps | Page 4

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