The wildest and bloodiest is over—
That war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth forget—
And all is peace,
The far-stretching circuits and vistas again to peace restored.
Peace brought with it military reviews, banquets, bouquets, women, flirtations, flattery,
And so goodbye to the war—
The field is clear’d, the war is over.

Yet never over—
The last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,
There was a vast legacy of suffering soldiers left when the contest was over,
The hospitals—alas! alas! the hospitals!—fuller than ever,
There is every kind of wound, in every part of the body, and twice as many sick as wounded.

While not the past forgetting,
As I walk these broad majestic days of peace,
I sing not war,
Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps,
Nor the regiments hastily coming up deploying in line of battle;
I dwell not on soldiers’ perils.
The camp, the drill, the lines of sentries, the prisons—
All have passed away—all seem now like a dream,
Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches and fields.

Hush’d be the camps today,
Now sound no note O trumpeters,
Nothing from you this time O drummers bearing my warlike drums,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
Today, at least, contention sunk entire.

Away with themes of war!
Away with war itself!
No more the sad, unnatural shows I knew of crimson war,
No more the dead and wounded,
Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated corpses.

War and the passions of war pass on,
A young and lusty generation already sweeps in with oceanic currents,
Obliterating the war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of hatred, conflict, death.
War and the angry fight pass,
War and the frantic tempers of men rage out their time and depart.
(I feel that if I should live a hundred years, they would be a hundred years without anger or revenge; I could never think of myself as firing a gun or drawing a sword on another man.)

Many the days and nights, passing away—
Time has assuaged the anguish of the living,  
The passionate hot tears have ceased to flow—
Many the burials, the graves one in passing meets,
The mighty waiting-camp of each of us, and of each and all in the ranks we fought.

There without hatred we all, all meet, content and silent there at last,
To sound of different, prouder songs, with stronger themes—
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,
Peace is always beautiful.

O sun of real peace! O free and ecstatic!
O what I here, preparing, warble for!
O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling, and take his height,
And you too, O my ideal, will surely ascend! conqueror yet—
All the armies and soldiers of the earth shall yet bow, and all the weapons of war become impotent.

Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers wreaths of roses and branches of palm,
Nor for the past alone—for meanings to the future,
Brotherhood uprisen, lifted, illumin’d, bathed in peace—elate, secure in peace,
The spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts, commerce, industry’s campaigns. 

I see the battle-fields—grass grows upon them, and blossoms and corn,
Orchard and yellow grain, cotton and rice,
The dead—their ashes’ exhalation in nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever.
O love, fructify all with the last chemistry,
Make these ashes to nourish and blossom, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw.

Melt, melt away ye armies,
Resolve ye back again, give up for good your deadly arms,
Other the arms, the fields, henceforth for you,
With saner wars, sweet wars, life-giving wars.

I see the heroes at other toils, to plough, hoe, dig,
To plant and tend the tree, the berry, vegetables, flowers,
The true arenas of my race, or first or last,
Man’s innocent and strong arenas.
Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping tools,
I see well-wielded in their hands the better weapons, all emblematic of peace,
With these and else and with their own strong hands the heroes all gather and all harvest.

Toil on heroes! harvest the products!
Toil on heroes! toil well! handle the weapons well!
Harvest the wheat, harvest the maize,
Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil barns,
Gather the cotton, clip the wool, cut the flax or hemp or tobacco,
Or aught that ripens under the beaming sun.
Not there your victory on those red shuddering fields,
But here and hence your victory,
Now in camps of green, content and silent there at last,
There without hatred we all, all meet.

Of the war itself, immensest results are doubtless waiting yet unform’d in the future, how long they will wait I cannot tell. The war is long over—yet do not those putrid conditions, too many of them, still exist? still result in diseases, fevers, wounds—not of war and army hospitals—but the wounds and diseases of peace?
Then turn, and be not alarm’d O Libertad—turn your undying face to where the future, greater than all the past, is swiftly, surely preparing for you the wounds and diseases of peace—perhaps to engage in time in still more dreadful contests, dangers, denser wars, longer campaigns and crises, labors beyond all others.

The work, the need goes on and shall go on,
The death-envelop’d march of peace as well as war goes on.
Wert capable of war, its tug and trials? be capable of peace, its trials,
For the tug and mortal strain of nations come at last in prosperous peace, not war,
A task of peace more difficult than the war itself—
For great campaigns of peace the same the wiry threads to weave,
Weave lasting sure, forever weave.

But I, more warlike, a war fight out—aye here, waged in my book—
A longer and greater one than any, the field the world;
A new soldier, bound for new campaigns, I sing war,
And to fiercer, weightier battles give expression,
For life and death, for the body and for the eternal soul.
My words are weapons,
Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all,
Don’t you know what the scriptures say? 
The son of man comes to bring a sword.

I above all promote brave soldiers,
Myself and this contentious soul of mine,
Still on our own campaigning bound,
War, peace, day and night absorbing,
Here marching, ever marching on,
Through untried roads, with ambushes, opponents lined,
With varying fortune, with flight, advance, and retreat,
Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis, often baffled,
Victory deferr’d and wavering,
Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last.

NEXT: NATURE

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).