Drum Taps | Page 5

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