Whitman And The Civil War
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Walt Whitman is one of the best known American poets. His poems promote the cause of freedom while simultaneously praising the dignity of the individual. His poems are usually about himself, yet in himself he sees the entire humanity and successfully communicates this to the reader, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Walt Whitman was a part of the transcendental movement of Poets in America, which also included Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Whitmans poem “Bivouac on a Mountain Side” he reflects on his observations and visions on the Civil War and uses imagery and symbolism to display his beliefs about the war in which he portrays more than just the tangible picture of a transcendentalists vision.
The use of imagery in “Bivouac on a Mountain Side” is one of the compelling factors that draws the reader into the poem so that he/she no longer reads what Whitman is writing, but rather sees what he is describing and understands Whitmans place in the war. Different from other Whitman poems, “Bivouac on a Mountain Side” does not contain the title phrase anywhere in the body of the poem, but rather sets the stage for the described scene. Whitmans use of imagery in “Bivouac on a Mountain Side” provides the basis for symbolic representation in the poem. In the first line of the poem, “I see before me now a traveling army halting”, begins the description of a troop that he is observing. Starting with the second line of the poem, Whitman attaches meaning to each of the elements in the poem. “A fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer” symbolizes the peaceful stillness of a country that has not been torn by war. In a sense, the second line is used to represent an unadulterated America. However, behind that lies “the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high, broken with rocks, with clinging cedars, and with tall shapes dingily seen”. The description of this grand and almost menacing mountain, in contrast to the valley, I believe shows not only the shadow the prospect of war puts on the country, but also the divergent beliefs and ways of life of the north and south that ultimately caused the Civil War. Whitmans view of the ware clearly illustrates that he believed that he understood the emotional and psychological aspects of the soldiers well enough to probe deeper into their minds in order to find truth that had been untold before. It is the strikingly different imageries used throughout the poem that helps set the mood of this poem. The next lines of the poem take the contrasting landscapes and add a human element into the poem in order to symbolically represent not the presence of human beings, but their emotion and thought. The fifth line, “The numerous camp-fires scatterd near and far, some away up on the mountain”, I believe not only gives the reader an image of the scene being depicted in the poem, but also is representative of a typical soldiers feeling and psyche during the war. Numerous journal accounts reveal that often during the time of war, the soldiers thoughts would “scatter” with things both near and far to them, with images of returning home, of peace, and of seeing their loved ones for the first time in months and possibly even years. The next line, line six, “the shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,” is essentially making reference to the fear and anxiety that was pervasive in the soldiers minds during times of rest. The restlessness was caused by their fear: fear of death, fear of the