heart: "Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! Strike with vengeful stroke." In his vision of the indispensable One encompassing the Many he salutes the sacrificial flag with an out-flaming national loyalty incomprehensible to the conscientious objector:
I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,
I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight—O the hard-contested fight!
The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles—the hurtled balls scream,
The battle-front forms amid the smoke—the volleys pour incessant from the line,
Hark, the ringing word Charge! now the tussle and the furious maddening yells,
Now the corpses tumble curl'd upon the ground.
Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,
Angry cloth I saw their leaping.
In the era of reconstruction after the war Whitman reconstructs his individualism in the light of his allegiance to the Union. Musing deeply of "these warlike days and of peace return'd, and the dead that return no more," he hears a phantom with stern visage bidding him chant the poem "that comes from the soul of America, chant me the carol of victory." Brooding once again upon the old mystery, why Lincoln wished to preserve the Union, what justified those rivers of fraternal blood, he bursts into this explanation of the ultimate purpose
