The Choir comments, speaking Walt Whitman’s verse and noble words.]
The Choir
This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
[Gradually, during these lines, a cold light has spread over the mourning multitude. Every vestige of war is gone. The people stand with drooping heads facing the stair, every hand holding a spray of lilac. The freed negroes kneel about the lower steps. A funeral march, gentle as a song of spring, begins. Men lift up the bier and carry it up the steps to the second landing. Freedom leads the cortege; the girls come after. The crowd closes in. At the second landing, the bier is set down and all the people go past it, filing out into the darkness which closes in again upon either side. In the meanwhile, over the music, Freedom and the two Spokesmen speak from Walt Whitman’s great song of mourning.]
Freedom
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourned and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
The First Spokesman
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen.
Passing the apple tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
The Second Spokesman
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the states themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and unbared heads....
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.