At last and at last when peace is declared,
The war is over,
The struggle of blood finish’d,
The price is paid.

By blue Ontario’s shore,
As I, extoller of hate and conciliation, mused of these warlike days,
And the dead that return no more,
A phantom with stern visage accosted me,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
The genius of poets of old lands,
Bards of the peaceful inventions, (for the war, the war is over!)

Chant me the poem, it said, chant me the carol of victory,
I hear victorious drums,
I see the results of the war glorious and inevitable,
And they again leading to other results—
Vast results to come for thrice a thousand years;
Sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory.

But it is best for you to be prepared for something different,
When late I sang sad was my voice:
O captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.

My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Spirit of many a solemn day and many a savage scene—electric spirit,
Spirit of dreadful hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day,
Touch my mouth, leave me your pulses of rage,
Bequeath them to me—fill me with currents convulsive,
(The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness,)
Let them scorch and blister out of my chants,
Let them identify you to the future in these songs.

One’s heart grows sick of the hell of war, after all, when you see what it really is,
It seems to me like a great slaughterhouse, the men mutually butchering each other,
It sickens me yet, that slaughter, that hell unpent and raid of blood,
Fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men;
In all this, brains did not rule—none of it, in fact.

Alas the ghastly ranks, the armies dread. They are hellish business, wars—all wars—any honest man says so—hates war, fighting, bloodletting. God damn every war—God damn ’em! God damn ’em! The people who like the wars should be compelled to fight the wars.

But the memories of the people are very evanescent. The fervid atmosphere and events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. Think how much, and of importance, will be buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.
Has anyone thought what a measureless history there holds in the crumbling contents of trenches, in countless graves, victor’s and vanquish’d, receding, mellowing, the dust of each fused in the dust of each?

Of many thousands of unknown heroisms, impromptu, first-class desperations, who tells? No poem sings, no music sounds, those deeds. The real war will never get in the books; its minutiæ of deeds and passions will never be even suggested. The interior history will never be written. Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors of the war.
The actual soldier—with all his ways, habits, practices, tastes, language, his incredible dauntlessness, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, superb strength and animality, lawless gait—will never be written, perhaps must not and should not be.

In those years I never could get away from the terrible experiences, and I have never left those days. They are here, now—real, terrible, beautiful days! I don’t think the war seemed so horrible to me at the time, when I was busy in the midst of its barbarism, as it does now, in retrospect. 

Yet was there not something grand, and an inside proof of perennial grandeur, in that war! We talk of our age’s materialism—and it is too true. But how amid the whole sordidness—the entire devotion to pecuniary success, merchandise, disregarding all but business and profit—this war for a bare idea and abstraction—a mere, at bottom, heroic dream and reminiscence—burst forth in its great devouring flame and conflagration, quickly and fiercely spreading and raging, and enveloping all, with magnificent rays, streaks of noblest heroism, fortitude, perseverance, and even conscientiousness.

To me, I found (and still, on recollection, find) the points illustrating the latent personal character of these millions of young men embodied in those armies—and especially the number stricken by wounds or disease—of more significance even than the political interests involved. (As so much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness.)

I don’t want to wipe out the memory—it is dear, sacred, infinitely so, to me. But I would rather not have it recur too frequently or too vividly. I don’t seem to be able to review that experience, that period, without extreme emotional stirrings—almost depressions. I don’t seem to be able to stand it in the present condition of my body. 

However I never once have questioned the decision that led me into the war. It was necessary; I went from the call of something within—something, I cannot explain what—something I could not disregard.
My relations with the boys there in Washington had fatherly, motherly, brotherly intimations—touched life on many sides—sympathetically, spiritually, dynamically—took me away from surfaces to roots. This is the very centre, circumference, umbilicus, of my whole career, coming into closest relations—relations oh! so close and dear!—with the whole strange welter of life gathered to that mad focus. 

It was in a sense the most nearly real work of my life. It arous’d and brought out and decided undream’d-of depths of emotion, giving closer insights, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity, tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul’s, the body’s tragedies, bursting the petty bonds of art. To these, what are your dramas and poems, even the oldest and the tearfulest? Books are all very well but this sort of thing is so much better.

It never occurred to me for a minute that I had any right or call to abandon my work. It was a religion with me, seized upon me, made me its servant, slave; induced me to set aside the other ambitions—a trail of glory in the heavens, which I followed, followed, with a full heart. War simply in the concrete—my aversion amounts to abhorrence—except as it expresses some spiritual fact.

If I had any rule at all that I observed it was just this: satisfy the boys themselves, at whatever sacrifice, always. I had to pay much for what I got. I had to give up health for it—my body—the vitality of my physical self—oh! much had to go—much that was inestimable.
My greatest call to go around and do what I could there in those war scenes where I had fallen, among the sick and wounded, was, that I seem’d to be so strong and well. I consider’d myself invulnerable. But this last attack shatter’d me completely.

All the wise ones said, Walt you should have saved yourself. I did save myself, though not in the way they mean. I saved myself in the only way salvation was possible to me. With the ravages of that experience finally reducing me to powder, still I say, I only gave myself—gave up health, great as health is, for something even greater than health. My body? Yes—it had to be given—it had to be sacrificed.

And what did I get for it? I got the boys, for one thing, thousands of them; they were, they are, they will be mine. I could not forget the boys—they were too precious. It made an old man of me, but I would like to do it all again if there were need—I got the boys.

Then I got “Leaves of Grass,”
Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, “Leaves of Grass” would not now be existing.
I saw the wounded and the dead, and never forget them,
Ever since have they been with me,
They have fused ever since in my poems,
They are here forever in my poems,
But for this I would never have had the consummated book, the last confirming word.

Yet a war O soldiers not for itself alone,
Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.
I think all war was really fought for the old cause—
Liberty, justice, the cause of the people;
As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to itself,
Around the idea of thee, old cause, revolving,
These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee,
These recitatives for thee—
My book and the war are one.

I never weighed what I gave for what I got, but I am satisfied with what I got; what I got made what I paid for it, much as it was, seem cheap. Whatever the years have brought—whatever sickness, what not—I have accepted the results as inevitable and right.
I would not for all the rest have missed those three or four years. Those years I consider the greatest privilege and satisfaction, (with all their feverish excitements and physical deprivations and lamentable sights,) and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life.

As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame,
As I muse retrospective, musing on long-pass’d war scenes,
Ashes of soldiers, your memories rising glide silently by me like pleasing phantoms,
Phantoms of countless lost, invisible to the rest.

Again to my sense your shapes—the war resumes,
Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising,
And again the advance of the armies—
From every point of the compass out of the countless graves, the dust and debris alive,
The gather’d thousands in their funeral mounds, and thousands never found or gather’d,
In myriads large, or squads of twos or threes or single ones they come,
Admitting around me comrades close, unseen by the rest and voiceless.

Now when my soul is rapt and at peace,
I chant this hymn of dead soldiers,
This chant of my silent soul in the name of the infinite dead:
As the Greek’s signal flame, by antique records told,
Rose from the hilltop, like applause and glory,
Welcoming in fame some special veteran, hero,
With rosy tinge reddening the land he’d served,
So I aloft lift high a kindled brand for you—a flash of duty long neglected—
I bind together and bequeath, in this bundle of songs, remembrances of the war for you, with my love.
Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers,
Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride.

Then I turned aside and mused on the unknown dead,
I thought of the unrecorded, of the countless buried unknown soldiers,
Of the vacant names, the thousands of unknown young men in the ranks,
About whom there is no record or fame,
No fuss about their dying so unknown—
Everywhere among these countless graves—in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word unknown.

The bravest soldiers press’d to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown,
I find in them the real precious and royal ones,
The heroes never surpass’d shall never return,
Volunteers who, bravely fighting, fell silent, to fill unmention’d graves.

You dark bequest from all the war,
You million unwrit names all, all,
The unnamed lost ever present in my mind,
A special verse for you:
Where are the dead we left behind, the unreturned, the sons of the mothers?
Henceforth become my companions,
Henceforth to be deep, deep within my heart recording, for many a future year,
Your mystic roll entire of unknown names,
Each name recall’d by me from out the darkness and death’s ashes,
Embalm’d with love in this twilight song.

One breath, O my silent soul, a perfum’d thought,
No more I ask, for the sake of all dead soldiers.
Dearest comrades, all is over and long gone, your mission is fulfill’d,
But love is not over—and what love, O comrades!
Perfume from battle-fields rising, up from the foetor arising;
Perfume therefore my chant, O love, immortal love,
Perfume all, O love, solve all, make all wholesome,
For the ashes of all dead soldiers,
The land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes.

I send my love sincerely to each and all,
The bullet could never kill what you really are,
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;
The soul! yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,
Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,
Nor the bayonet stab.  

Gather closer yet, follow me ever—desert me not while I live,
For sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living,
Sweet are the musical voices sounding,
But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead with their silent eyes,
Faces so pale, very dear, with wondrous eyes.

NEXT: PEACE

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).