Another's Civil War

Taking the briefest of breaks from my Lincoln reading, before taking on the newest full biography, A. Lincoln, by Ronald C. White Jr. (to be released January 13th,) I turned to Walt Whitman tonight, and his experience of the War, it's devastation's and losses, personal and public.   A new book, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, tells not only of the great poet, but of his family, and in particular two younger brothers who fought in the war.  It is a valuable story, and well told by Roper.

Like most American families, Whitman's was deeply effected by their experience of the War.  Unlike most American families though, the Whitman family had a genius among them.  While the letters, largely unknown to me before, exchanged between the brothers and with their mother and reproduced here, are poignant and very interesting, it is of course to Walt and his poems that one turns to find their experiences, and the experience of our people, memorialized in unforgettable verse.

And Walt Whitman's own experience, nursing and caring for, and genuinely coming to love the soldiers he met in the army hospitals he visited every day, as detailed in an earlier and wonderful book, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, by Roy Morris Jr., produced in Whitman, our greatest poet, some of his greatest, and most heartfelt work.

So tonight I find myself reading and rereading Whitman's poems.  And one poem, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," haunts me as I see our soldiers again in war; young, older, even my age, and for the most part never seen but in a formal photograph, in uniform, in the paper when they die.  Here is Whitman's poem:

A Sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunk about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step -- and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third -- a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

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 he again lies.  

Remembering Phyllis McGinley... More Snowbound Reading

Do you remember the American poet Phyllis McGinley?  No less a poet than W. H. Auden wrote a foreword to her collected poems.  She's gone out of print, as the saying goes, but that is no reflection on her.  Do please search out her books.  She is a consistent delight.

She was born in 1905 in Ontario, Oregon and died in 1978, in New York City.  In between she married, moved to the then new "suburbs," raised children and wrote some of the best light verse of the last century.

Herewith, a Christmas favorite from 1948.

What Every Woman Knows

When Little boys are able

  To comprehend the flaws

In their December fable

  And part with Santa Claus,

Although I do not think they grieve,

How burningly they disbelieve!

They cannot wait, they cannot rest

For knowledge nibbling at the breast.

They cannot rest, they cannot wait

To set conniving parents straight.

Branding that comrade as a dunce

Who trusts the saint they trusted once,

With rude guffaw and facial spasm

They publish their iconoclasm,

And find particularly shocking

The thought of hanging up a stocking.

But little girls (no blinder

  When faced by mortal fact)

Are cleverer and kinder

  And brimming full of tact.

The knowingness of little girls

Is hidden underneath their curls.

Obligingly, since parents fancy

The season's tinsel necromancy,

They take some pains to make pretense

Of duped and eager innocence.

Agnostics born but Bernhardts bred,

They hang the stocking by the bed,

Make plans, and pleasure their begetters

By writing Santa lengthy letters.

Only too well aware the fruit

Is shinier plunder, richer loot.

For little boys are rancorous

  When robbed of any myth,

And spiteful and cantankerous

  To all their kin and kith.

But little girls can draw conclusions

And profit from their lost illusions.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

By Thomas Campion

Now winters nights enlarge

The Number of their hours,

And clouds their storm discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze,

And cups o'erflow with wine;

Let well-tuned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love,

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep's leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense

With lovers' long discourse;

Much speech hath some defense,

Though beauty no remorse.

All do not all things well;

Some measures comely tread,

Some knotted riddles tell,

Some poems smoothly read.

The summer hath his joys

And winter his delights;

Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,

They shorten tedious nights.