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 cofin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
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 cofin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Or read "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," another picture of the dead soldier, ending with a swift mystical vision of his transfiguration by the love which passes understanding:
I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
There is more of the high pity and terror of war, more of the valor and tenderness that come straight from the magnanimous heart, in Whitman's battle chants and dirges than in all our other war poetry put together.
"In Homer and Shakespere," says Whitman truly, one will find a "certain heroic ecstasy, which, or the suggestion of which, is never absent in the works of the masters." That heroic ecstacy is present in Whitman himself. There is not a page of him in
