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CHAPTER FIVE Urbanization and War With the onset of the Civil War,Whitman was,according to his own accounts, drawn out of nature and into history. His attention to the sacred time of tides and seasons and the sacred places of ancestors and originsyieldedtoaworldviewinwhichtimeismeasuredbytheeventsof social and political life and the sense of place is colored by the geographic mobility and dislocation associated with modernity. Not that he was ever actually absent from history or that his concept of nature was not historically conditioned,buthissenseof historicalmissiongavewayattimestoamythically oriented immersion in ceremonial time and sacred place. With the intrusion of the tides of war, the island poet was again suffused with historical consciousness. We have seen how in poems like “This Compost” and “Passage to India” Whitmanemploysarhetoricof turningawayfromtheearth,questioningthe intent of nature toward human life,only to turn back again,affirming finally a deep connection to the earthy root of all being, usually in an effort to reconcile human concerns with natural forces.And we have seen how in“Song of the Rolling Earth,”while questioning our ability to communicate directly with the great mother and even our own bodies, which form “substantial words” outside the limits of language, the poet left open the possibility of knowing the body and the earth from the resonances that sound within the human soul. The“silence”of the earth and its indifference to the words and actions of its wayward human children were themes that continued to haunt Whitman in his writings from the war years, nowhere more clearly than in the remarkable Drum-Taps poem“Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun,”which is perhaps his most powerful dramatization of the inner conflict over the enticements of a quiet life that resonates with calm creativity and a tumultuous existence amid the dense humanity of urban life, as well as his most direct treatment of the intertwined forces of urbanization and war. The poem begins with a rejection of urban life and an affirmation of the pastoral pleasures he associates with living close to nature. “Give me the splendidsilentsunwithallhisbeamsfull-dazzling,”thepoetsays,thenreels off a catalog of pleasurable images — “the unmow’d grass,” “the trellis’d Q grape,”“fresh corn and wheat,”“serene-moving animals teaching content,” landscapes wild as well as enclosed and cultivated (“high plateaus west of the Mississippi,” “a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturb ’d”), a simple domestic life with wife and family (“a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should never tire,” “a perfect child”) — all the senses engaged and the general impression of the calm and quiet necessary for close communion with the earth, the desire for which gains emphasis with each repetition of the anaphoric“Give me,”as if forming a prayer to Nature with a capital N: “Give me solitude, . . . give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”(LG 1891–92,244).But at the midpoint of the poem,the poet turns back, and the rejection of Nature that follows is never reversed as it was in earlier poems. This time it is not the earth that conceals its meaning from the curious poet or seems cold, indifferent, and thingish so much as it is the poet who, after looking first for comfort in nature — “tired with ceaseless excitement”in the city and“rack’d by the war-strife”(LG 1891–92, 244) — rejects the prospects of the silent earth and allows himself to be consumed by the clamor of the big city and the big war. He adheres to the city, which holds him “enchain’d” till the soul itself, “glutted”by stimulation,yields to the attraction and tramples on his desire to escape (LG 1891–92, 245). On the one hand, the pejorative connotations of “enchain’d,”“glutted,” and “trampling” hint at the poet’s resistance, but on the other hand, the diction suggests a version of rough erotic appeal, which, as critics such as Byrne Fone and Mark Maslan have suggested, was deeply attractive to Whitman in certain moods. Now the intensity of the city completely possesses the poet,obliterating his taste for simple pastoral comforts. “Keep your splendid silent sun,” he says at the turning point of the poem:“Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods . . . your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards.” The promise of high stimulation overwhelms his resistance:“Give me faces and streets — give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs ! / Give me interminable eyes — give me...

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