April soft and cold: The sisters Death and Night

To mark the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, let’s hear from one of the most American poets of all time, Walt Whitman.

Already in his forties when the War Between the States broke out, Whitman hadn’t intended to join the army, although he was a firm supporter of the Union cause. But after searching for his wounded brother at the end of 1862 (he found him), he took a part-time job with the Paymaster General in Washington, and volunteered as a nurse in army hospitals.

Whitman’s most famous poem about Lincoln’s death, “When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom’d” is longer than I like to post. And I want to go a different route anyhow. So here’s “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”, which I find highly evocative. I’ve not given you any poetry from this period (because I find so much of it awful), so let’s run with this one for a bit.

“Cavalry Crossing a Ford”

A LINE in long array, where they wind betwixt green islands;

 They take a serpentine course—their arms flash in the sun—Hark to the musical clank;

 Behold the silvery river—in it the splashing horses, loitering, stop to drink;

 Behold the brown-faced men—each group, each person, a picture—the negligent rest on the saddles;

Some emerge on the opposite bank—others are just entering the ford—while,

Scarlet, and blue, and snowy white,

The guidon flags flutter gaily in the wind.

And, closer to the mark for the end of the war and the loss of Lincoln:

“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:

... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.