Such things
are gloomy--yet there is a text, 'God doeth all things well'--the meaning
of which, after due time, appears to the soul." It is only love that can
comfort the loving.
He forced nothing on these friends of a day, so many of them near their
last farewell. A poor wasted young man asks him to read a chapter in the
New Testament, and Whitman chooses that which describes Christ's
Crucifixion. He "ask'd me to read the following chapter also, how Christ
rose again. I read very slowly, for he was feeble. It pleased him very
much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask'd me if I enjoy'd religion.
I said 'Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, yet maybe, it is the
same thing.'" This is only one of many such serene intimacies in
Whitman's experiences of the war. Through them we reach to an
understanding of a poet who chose not signal and beautiful episodes out
of the past, nor the rare moments of existence, for theme, but took all
life, within and around him in vast bustling America, for his poetic
province. Like a benign barbaric sun he surveys the world, ever at noon.
I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there, he cries in the "Song of Myself."
I do not despise you priests, all times, the world over.... He could not
despise anything, not even his fellow-poets, because he himself was
everything.
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