III
The Civil War found Whitman young; it left him an old man. There seems to have been no middle-age period in his life. He had matured with slowness; at forty, when he issued the 1860 Leaves of Grass, he was in the very prime of youth, the physical still central. There had been no suffering in his life, no grip of experience; he spoke much of the soul, but the soul was still of secondary importance. He wrote to his mother in 1862:
I believe I weigh about two hundred, and as to my face (so scarlet) and my beard and neck, they are terrible to behold. I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals among the poor languishing and wounded boys, is that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair. Many of the soldiers are from the West, and far North, and they take to a man that has not the bleached, shiny and shaven cut of the cities and the East.[88]
The world of the 1860 Leaves of Grass is a world as viewed by a perfectly healthy young man, who has had his way to the full. The appeal of it is physiological rather than spiritual. It ends the first period of Whitman's poetical life.
His next book, Drum-Taps, came in 1866. Between the two had come the hospital experience of 1862–1865, from which had emerged the Whitman of the later period.
He had been drawn into this hospital experience, as into everything else in his life, almost by accident. It had come to him after no hard-fought battle with himself; it was the result of no compelling convictions. The war had progressed for a year before it assumed concrete proportions for him. It required the news that his brother was lying desperately wounded at Fredericksburg to move his imagination. When he had arrived at the front and had found his brother in no serious condition after all, he had drifted almost by accident into the misery of the ambulance trains and the hospitals, and before he had realized it, he was in the midst of the army nurses, working as if he had volunteered for the service. And thus he had drifted on to the end of the war, a self-appointed hospital worker, touching and helping thousands of sinking lives.
And he gave during those three years not only his youth but also his health of body. He was weakened at length with malaria and infected with blood poisoning from a wound that he had dressed. Moreover, the experience drained him on the side of his emotions and his nervous vitality until he went home to become at last paralytic and neurotic. The strain upon him he has described with a realism that unnerves one:
I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,
While the attendant stands beside me holding the tray and pail.
I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame).
The war allowed Whitman to put into practice all his young manhood's dream of saviorship. It turned him from a preacher into a prophet and a man of action, one who took his earlier message and illustrated it at every point with works. It awakened within him a new ideal of life. He had been dealing heretofore with words:
Words! book-words! What are you?
Words no more, for harken and see,
My song is there in the open air, and I must sing,
With the banner and pennant a-flapping.
No longer does he exult in his mere physical body. Lines like these he now edits from his early editions:
How dare a sick man, or an obedient man, write poems for these States?
Also lines like these:
O to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues!
O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common ground! O adhesiveness!
O the pensive aching to be together,—you know not why, and I know not why.
He omits everywhere freely now from the early editions, not from the "Children of Adam," however, though Emerson advised it with earnestness. The Whitmans were an obstinate race. "As obstinate as a Whitman," had been a degree of comparison; and here was one of them who had taken a position before the world and had maintained it in the face of persecution. Retreat would be impossible; but it is noteworthy that he wrote no more poems of sex and that he put forth no more of his tall talk and braggadocio. Swiftly he had become the poet of the larger life: the immaterial in man, the soul.
Drum-Taps, 1866, gives us the first glimpse of this new Whitman. The tremendous poem, "Rise, O Days, from Your Fathomless Deeps," marks the transition. In it he declares that he had, with hunger of soul, devoured only what earth had given him, that he had sought to content himself simply with nature and the material world.
Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious.
He does not condemn this earlier phase of his development:
'Twas well, O soul—'twas a good preparation you gave me,
Now we advance our latest and ampler hunger to fill.
Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us.
Now for the first time he realizes the meaning of Democracy, the deep inner meaning of Man and America.
Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads through farms, only half satisfied,
One doubt nauseous undulating like a snake, crawl'd on the ground before me,
Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low;
The cities I loved so well I abandon'd and left, I sped to the certainties suitable to me,
Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature's dauntlessness,
I refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only,
I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire—on the water and air I waited long;
But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted,
I have witness'd the true lightning, I have witness'd my cities electric,
I have lived to behold man burst forth.
It is the same thrill that had aroused Stedman, and made him proud for the first time of his country. Henceforth the poet will sing of Men—men not as magnificent bodies, but as triumphant souls. Drum-Taps fairly quivers and sobs and shouts with a new life. America has risen at last—one feels it in every line. The book gives more of the actual soul of the great conflict and of the new spirit that arose from it than any other book ever written. "Come up from the Fields, Father," tells with simple pathos that chief tragedy of the war, the death message brought to parents; "The Wound-Dresser" pictures with a realism almost terrifying the horrors of the hospitals after a battle; "Beat! Beat! Drums!" arouses like a bugle call; such sketches as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," and "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," are full of the thrill and the excitement of war; and finally the poems in "Memories of President Lincoln": among them "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain! My Captain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," come near to the highest places yet won by elegaic verse in English.