Section Week 2

1. Section Week 2 • Walt Whitman • Herman Melville • Ambrose Bierce • Louisa May Alcott • Emily Dickinson

2. Walt Whitman “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” • Overall feel/focus of this poem? “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” • Who/What is this poem about? Interesting source for interested parties: The Walt Whitman Archive at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

3. “Drum-Taps” • Includes “The Wound-Dresser” (many poems were added over time to this collection, folded into Leaves of Grass/Song of Myself in its different permutations and editions) • “The two, the past and present, have interchanged, / I myself as connector” (434, from “The Centenarian’s Story”) • Note some repeating images: flags, drums and trumpets (noise), lines marching, ships/ocean, the wounded

4. Death: comrade, merciful, cyclical • “(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly.)” (“The Wound-Dresser,” 444) • “Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, / And the thought of death close-walking on the other side of me, / And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions” (“Lilacs,” lines 120-21) • “Come lovely and soothing death / … / Sooner or later delicate death” (“Lilacs,” lines 135 and 138) • “They [the dead] themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not / The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d” (“Lilacs,” lines 181-82) • “I leave thee [sprig of lilac] there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring” (“Lilacs,” line 194) • “Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well” (“Lilacs,” line 203)

5. Sentiment • Contradictions re: being sentimental and not (in “Drum-Taps”) • “No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year, / Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano, / But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder.” Hears the soldier’s “masculine voice” (418, from “Eighteen Sixty-One”) • “Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer, / Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, / Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties” (420, from “Beat! Beat! Drums!”) • “It sickens me yet, that slaughter! / I saw the moisture gather in drops on the face of the General. / I saw how he wrung his hands in anguish” (433, from “The Centenarian’s Story”—on George Washington) • See “Come Up from the Fields Father” pages 436-38 (news sent to a family of son’s wounding [he’s actually dead]). • See “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” pages 438-39 (about a father burying his son where he falls on the field)

6. Unity/Universality • Unity of humanity; recall Transcendentalist thought • Even between North and South; often catalogues different states • “To sing first, (to the tap of the war-drum if need be,) / The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable, / And then the song of each member of these States” (420, from “From Paumanok Starting I Fly like a Bird”) • “Not now are we any one of these spacious and haughty States, (nor any five, nor ten)” (424, from “Song of the Banner at Daybreak”). In this section he extends to both shores, the entire continent (see page 425). • “Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)” (443, from “The Wound-Dresser)

7. Time • The continuance and blending of wars • See “The Centenarian’s Story” on remembering the Revolutionary War (430-35). What’s the Virginia connection?

8. “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (in “Drum-Taps,” 451-52) Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human, With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet? Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet? (’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines, Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com’st to me, As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.) Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d, A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought. No further does she say, but lingering all the day, Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye, And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by. What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?

9. Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea (Savannah Campaign), Nov.-Dec. 1864 [engraving, Alexander Hay Ritchie]

10. Gone with the Wind (1939) Destruction of the South • Set in Atlanta, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell (1936; won the Pulitzer in 1937) • Hattie McDaniel (Mammy—House Servant). First African American to win an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress)

11. Food for Thought re: Whitman • “Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and prosperity only, / But now, ah now, to learn from crises and anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not, / And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are” (445, from “The Wound-Dresser” in “Drum-Taps”) • See “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”—yearning for normalcy, “a rural domestic life,” “solitude,” “Nature” (page 446 in “Drum-Taps”). But “give me the streets of Manhattan! Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and drums!” (447). *consider contradictions—idealizing and lamenting the character of US citizenry; conflicting desires

12. Herman Melville • What’s “The Portent” about?

13. John Brown • Abolitionist • Led the 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre (Kansas) • Led the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry (Virginia, now West Virginia) for munitions, for which he was publicly hanged • “John Brown’s Body” became a popular Union Song during the Civil War. • See Franny Nudelman’s John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War

14. Imaginings of John Brown—his execution and legacy

15. Spectacle of War • Whitman imagines spectacle, too, in “Drum-Taps”: • “The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their favorites.” But the cannons will “begin the red business” (417). • “The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in earnest, no mere parade now” (418). • Melville critiques it more forcefully: • “In Bacchic glee they file toward Fate, / Moloch’s uninitiate” (“The March into Virginia,” page 44, lines 22-23) • See “Misgivings”—“Nature’s dark side is heeded now” (page 37, line 8) • The young celebrate war while the old despair (they know better). • “I saw a sight—saddest that eyes can see— / Young soldiers marching lustily / Unto the wars, / With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry; / While all the porches, walks, and doors / Were rich with ladies cheering royally” (“Ball’s Bluff,” pages 46-48, lines 2-7) • Fears that mechanization will become a trap, snare, or grave for soldiers. See “In the Turret” on the “iron battle’s burden” as the sailor tries to survive the sinking of his battle ship (pages 66-67) • Yet he celebrates “brave Lyon” in the poem “Lyon” (see page 44) from the Battle of Springfield, Missouri, 1861.

16. The Sea/Ports • Imagery of the port and the sea—he and Whitman are tied to New York, so they often mention Manhattan and sometimes Brooklyn (for example, see Whitman’s “Drum-Beats” re: “City of Ships” pp. 429-30). • See Gangs of New York (2002) for a reminder of the ports of New York: transferring the dead back home and sending out fresh troops from the same ports, using the same ships. • A ship on a stormy sea is an apt metaphor for war (and perhaps particularly a civil war).

17. Ambrose Bierce “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Reality and fantasy—North and South • Twilight Zone episode: http://www.viddler.com/explore/nzgmediefag/videos/12/ • YouTube has other versions/clips

18. Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” Performance: • “I add some of my notes made by the way, hoping that they will amuse the reader, and convince the skeptical that such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist, that she really did go to Washington, and that these Sketches are not romance” (12). • What’s the role of the postscript (chapter 6)?

19. Plays with Gender (Topsy-Turvy) • Feminized: • “I’m a woman’s rights women, and if any man had offered help in the morning, I should have condescendingly refused it, sure that I could do everything as well, if not better, myself. My strong-mindedness had rather abated since then, and I was now quite ready to be a ‘timid trembler,’ if necessary. Dear me! how easily Darby did it all: he just asked one question, received an answer, tucked me under his arm, and in ten minutes I stood in the presence of Mc K., the Desired” (9). • “I just put my arms about her, and began to cry in a very helpless but hearty way; for, as I seldom indulge in this moist luxury, I like to enjoy it with all my might, when I do” (67). • “a woman’s heart yearns over anything that has clung to her for help and comfort. I never liked these breakings-up of my little household” (69). • In the end, when she’s sick she resists going home until her father visits: “when he said, ‘Come home,’ I answered, ‘Yes, father;’ and so ended my career as an army nurse” (60). • The wounded men: • John, though feminized, is also concerned with his masculinity. He cares for his family as a provider (brother to his siblings and stand-in husband to his mother), and he worries about how he was wounded: “I’ve shown I was willing to give my life, and perhaps I’ve got to; . . . I’m a little sorry I wasn’t wounded in front; it looks cowardly to be hit in the back, but I obeyed orders, and it doesn’t matter in the end, I know” (42). • Compare to how the soldier Fitz was “ashamed to show fear before a woman” (71).

20. Gender Cont. • Masculinized or challenging accepted roles: • “I’ve enlisted!” (4). • “Having heard complaints of the absurd way in which American women become images of petrified propriety, if addressed by strangers, when traveling alone, the inborn perversity of my nature causes me to assume an entirely opposite style of deportment” (13). • “Having a taste for ‘ghastliness,’ I had rather longed for the wounded to arrive, for rheumatism wasn’t heroic, neither was liver complaint, or measles” (21). • “I was there to work, not to wonder or weep; so I corked up my feelings, and returned to the path of duty” (22). • She’s washing men’s bodies, clutching her soap “manfully” (23). • Wounded are likened to children (sometimes girls; see feminized John in chapter 4) and herself as a parent; but also a queen (“my reign” p. 32) and sacrifices more than the surgeons (50). She feels like being a preacher in the hospital (65) and has “a fellow feeling for lads” (68). She sees operations, and “the height of my ambition was to go to the front after a battle” (69). Surprised to find how many men treat her as an equal, a colleague (72). • Unexpected comments and tone—“I remember that, at the swimming school, fat girls always floated best, and in an instant my plan is laid. At the first alarm I firmly attach myself to the plump lady, and cling to her through fire and water; for I feel that my old enemy, the cramp, will seize me by the foot, if I attempt to swim” (14; note tense here, too). • Unlike Whitman, she doesn’t want to show mercy to the Rebels/Confederate soldiers; she plans to pour soap in one’s eyes (25). • The youngest surgeon “seemed to consider me a frail young blossom, that needed much cherishing, instead of a tough old spinster, who had been knocking about the world for thirty years” (47). • On her hospital room: It has “[a] mirror (let us be elegant!)” (48; sarcastic tone). • Statues of women in the capital: “Several robust ladies attracted me . . . but which was America and which Pocahontas was a mystery, for all affected much looseness of costume, dishevelment of hair, swords, arrows, lances, scales, and other ornaments quite passé with damsels of our day, whose effigies should go down to posterity armed with fans, crochet needles, riding whips, and parasols, with here and there one holding a pen or pencil, rolling-pin or broom” (54).

21. People and Wounds/People As Wounds • Compare to Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser” (Norton version) • “Straight and swift to my wounded I go” (line 26) • “To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss” (line 31) • Section 3: “The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away)” • “Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye” (line 42) • “I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep” (line 50) • “I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound” (line 53) • Alcott identifies more of her patients by name but still chronicles wounds. Critiques one doctor for treatment of wounds vs. men: • “Dr. P., through long acquaintance with many of the ills flesh is heir to, had acquired a somewhat trying habit of regarding a man and his wound as separate institutions, and seemed rather annoyed that the former should express any opinion upon the latter, or claim any right in it, while under his care” (70).

22. An example of Alcott’s travels (mobility) • Disparages Baltimore pp. 16-18 and buries African Americans in this description: “A big, dirty, shippy, shiftless place, full of goats, geese, colored people, and coal” (16). • Note her descriptions of African Americans in this city: “We often passed colored people, looking as if they had come out of a picture book, or off the stage, but not at all the sort of people I’d been accustomed to see at the North” (17). Stereotypes on page 58, too. • Notes riot in Baltimore, Maryland. April 19, 1861 (Pratt Street Massacre, just before battle at Fort Sumter) Baltimore riot Fort Sumter, South Carolina

23. Death and Burial • Remember Whitman’s “Drum-Taps”: “And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited” (439, from “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”). • Alcott comments on hasty burials. On John: “When they had made him ready for the grave, John lay in state for half an hour, a thing which seldom happened in that busy place” (45). • “In most Hospitals I hope there are [religious services at deathbeds]; in ours, the men died, and were carried away, with as little ceremony as on a battlefield” (62). • But, as with Whitman, death can be a comfort and companion (personified). On John: “half an hour’s acquaintance with Death had made them friends” (46). • People also look better dead than alive—Whitman compares a corpse’s face to that of Christ (441). Alcott on a boy: “the subtle fever, burning his strength away, flushed his cheeks with color, filled his eyes with lustre, and lent a mournful mockery of health to face and figure, making the poor lad comelier in death than in life” (66).

24. Alcott’s “My Contraband” • Contraband: –noun 1. anything prohibited by law from being imported or exported. 2. goods imported or exported illegally. 3. illegal or prohibited trade; smuggling. 4. International Law: contraband of war. 5. (during the American Civil War) a black slave who escaped to or was brought within the Union lines. –adjective 6. prohibited from export or import. *Reminds us of the dehumanization of slaves as chattel or property From Dictionary.com

25. What’s the role of revenge in “My Contraband”? See Glory (1989) trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHpifdzpXUg&feature=related

26. Emily Dickinson • Wrote mostly from home in Massachusetts; published little in her lifetime. In later years she bound her poems in groupings called “fascicles.” Close relationships with women around her (scholars debate about her sexual orientation). Scholars also often label many of her poems feminist. • Some of her most famous poems: “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” • Wrote a lot on death, perception and truth, faith, gender, nature, the act of writing/publishing

27. #339 I like a look of Agony, Because I know it’s true – Men do not sham Convulsion, Nor stimulate, a Throe – The eyes glaze once – and that is Death – Impossible to feign The Beads opon [sic] the Forehead By homely Anguish strung. (85)

28. #479 Or rather – He passed us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle – We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity – (88) Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Grazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun –