Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the
moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and
with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call.
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main
words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish,
taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through
her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be
better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

–Walt Whitman

Whitman and Doyle

I have always been intrigued by Walt Whitman and feel an especial affinity for him because the house he once lived in, although no longer standing, was diagonally across the street from the building where I work every day.  Beyond this personal anecdote, Whitman is intriguing because of the warmth and humanity he exuded. Through his prose he rendered the 620,000 men killed in the war more human.  He chronicled what he saw, heard, and smelled in the hospital wards unflinchingly, yet somehow never succumbed to cynicism or despair.  The real war, he famously told us, would never get into the books.  And yet he never lost his confidence in democracy and the innate wisdom of the American people.  These were no small things when so much was falling apart between 1861-1865.

Whitman’s companion of many decades was Peter Doyle.  Doyle was a native Irishman, which is somewhat surprising given Whitman’s slight tendencies toward nativism.  His family moved to Virginia when he was eight and it was there that the two met years later. Distance and sexual orientation would keep the two from settling together, but they managed a surprisingly open relationship given the time.  Doyle was also the muse for many of Whitman’s most famous works.

(Image by M.P. Rice, courtesy Ohio Wesleyan)