jackieg

In this portion of his work, Whitman candidly paints a portrait of what it is like to experience war first hand. I feel that war is a time of mixed emotions. On the one hand, people are losing their loved ones and experiencing death and sadness all around them. However, so many feel a collective pride in the country and what their soldiers are fighting for. This was true in Whitman’s day and still holds true today. The first few poems in the sequence literally describe how the nation comes together when they are called to fight for their country. The men stopped what they were doing to answer their call of duty and the country became less like muse for the poet and more like a cold battleground.

The poem that really struck me was “The Centenarian’s Story”. In this poem, the poet is visiting with a hundred year old man who is a veteran of the Revolutionary War. The poem is set where the Battle of Brooklyn Heights took place. The poet describes to the old man what is going on around him because his eyesight is failing. This account launches the old man into is recollection of the battle and what he vividly remembers. What I liked so much about it was the parallel between the two generations and perhaps the not-so-ovbvious connection it has to future generations. It seems as though every generation has their own struggles and battles to fight. Some perhaps even have the sad experience of a time of war just like these two men did. The old man made the younger man realize that right where these troops were doing their drills, many men lost their lives fighting the same kind of battle. That can be taken beyond this setting and thought about for any other battle fought in any other war.

In “Come up from the fields Father” and “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night”, death comes into account much more vividly. Death is never something that is forgotten during wartime, but sometimes it seems to be shrouded in a patriotic light. This is not to say that that is a bad thing, but these two poems seem to capture the raw reality of death from the perspective of a grieving family and from the first hand. These, as well as all the rest of the poems are interesting to read in this time because we are experiencing war right now. There are so many men who are seeing their friends die in front of them and so many families who are receiving the word that their son or daughter was lost in the war. This just goes to show that so much of Whitman’s poetry rings true now and will continue to for so many generations to come.