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Drum Taps by Walt Whitman
page 13 of 72 (18%)
lump awaiting the leaven no less than is "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." To
this supreme spectator an apple orchard in May, even the White House in
moonlight, no more and no less than these battle-scenes, rendered up
their dignity, life, and beauty, their true human significance. But in
"Drum-Taps" the witness is not always so satisfactory. The secret has
evaporated in the 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.

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