Hopeless Consolation in Whitman's Drum Taps

Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps is an extensive book that chronicles affective scenes from the Civil War. It was Whitman’s attempt to honor the men and women who lost their lives during this cataclysmic time in American history. Whitman chronicles the melancholy and finiteness of life through graphic images of soldiers who have suffered through the atrocities that the war brought to the United States. However, the images conveyed throughout each poem and book are of violence and death and the juxtaposition of life and renewal through his service as a nurse in the field hospitals for the Confederate army. However, it is clear that Whitman did not believe that these two incongruities really balanced each other out, and the horrific side of the war had a more lasting impact.

This senseless horror that Whitman wishes to convey is most prominent in his poem A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim. The poem begins with a dream like pastoral line about the placidity of a gray dawn. However, the narrator emerges sleepless which conveys an anxious affective dynamic when juxtaposed with how the narrator is feeling, as he will “emerge so early sleepless” (Whitman 288). The line immediately conveys to the reader that this is not a scene of the peaceful pastoral that he is well-known for. He conveys to the reader that there are stretchers lying with blankets covering them. It is unclear what is actually happening with the blanket, but since he is a nurse, his readers hope that he will convey a scene of solace and comfort to an injured soldiers. Whitman robs the reader of this with the proceeding line in which we learn that “Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all” (Whitman 289). Whitman’s word choice conveys a melancholy scene. The blanket is simply ample, it provides no comfort to the reader and is conveyed almost as a necessity, simply serving its purpose of providing cover. The blanket is not conveyed as providing warmth, shelter, or safety, tradition positive images, but it simply “covers” in this scene. This is meant to reinforce that this is a hopeless scene, and then death cannot be reversed, but that we must be o.k. with it, because it is immutable.

Horror is further conveyed in the narrator’s inquisitive reservations about lifting the blanket to view the soldier. Whitman is tapping into human’s general desire to be fascinated with horror, and our proclivity to explore it. It is simply not enough to know the horror below the sheet, but we must see it for ourselves. However, the suspense of the line is lifted when Whitman offers consolation to the man who lies died. He questions the body, with genuine interest asking “Who are you my dear comrade” (Whitman 289)? The placid and thoughtful reaction counterbalances the terror of the unknown face under the sheet and conveys a sense of comfort and peace for the reader as he calmly brings the biography of a man from the dead corpse. However, he erases the placidity with the concrete description of the body as “gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes” (Whitman 289). Again, this reinforces that while the soldier deeply deserves (and has arguably earned) our empathy, we can not escape the hopeless reality that the war has brought to the soldier, but more largely, to a nation as well.

Whitman’s grim scenes in the poem suggest that although the war has brought an end to the political institution of slavery, it has left death and despair in its wake, and that it can never be erased. Furthermore, the bleak imagery and raw diction in the poem forces the reader to question the cost that was paid for freedom, and serves as a warning for the terror that political and social division can bring to a powerful nation.

Whitman, Walt. Drum Taps. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Simon and Brown. 2011.

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