Battle Lines. Eliza Richards
the unbridgeable distance between battle and home fronts.” For Barrett, Melville shows that “poetry and journalism equally fail at the task of representing the horrors of war.”71
Melville indeed meticulously forges correspondences between home front and war front via figures of weather and the news, and he shows these correspondences to be faulty, insufficient, partial, ideologically saturated, and even delusional. Like the soldiers, the listeners may be rain soaked and shivering while waiting for the latest bulletins to be posted, as Cohen and Garner point out, but that does not so easily indicate “their essential similarity of situation” and the “universal prevalence of suffering.” The listeners have coats, and one even has an umbrella that Melville rather extravagantly likens to “an ambulance-cover / Riddled with bullet-holes, spattered all over.”72 The simile shows the distance and difference more than the sameness of the listeners’ experiences; the hail that damaged the umbrella may be related to, but is only a soft echo of, the bullet-perforated, mud-spattered ambulance. He and the other listeners can and do go home each night of the three-day battle, returning in the morning; many of the soldiers contract frostbite and die of exposure while they sleep.
Melville stages this difference, but he does not wholly condemn it; he himself is immersed in it, and it is this unavoidable immersion that he most strongly indicates. It is a circumstance to be confronted, not overcome. The gap, both produced and made visible by the journalistic reportage intermixed with Melville’s poem, can be measured and perhaps diminished as a result. Melville, like Thomson and Cowper before him, takes as a starting point that apprehending remote suffering is a difficult if not impossible task. Milette Shamir notes that in “Donelson” particularly, Melville performs “a dynamic back and forth investigation of the civilian author, whose distance allows a broad vision of the war even as it undermines that vision’s access to truth and ethical viability.”73 At the same time that ethical viability is undermined, it is ethically necessary for the civilian to seek and recognize truth’s limits. The difficulty multiplies when those suffering are strangers who are dying en masse out of sight and sound in circumstances that bear no relation to those of the bystanders, who learn of their circumstances in highly mediated, if relatively immediate, ways. The poem is less concerned with portraying the perfection or fallibility of remote apprehension of Civil War suffering than with posing it as a problem to be articulated, considered, and analyzed, if not solved. New communication technologies, Melville suggests, require new ways of processing the information that is transmitted, because the medium and its particular forms of mediation change the message. Whereas Thomson perhaps believed he had found a solution to the problem by summoning a perfect sympathy in readers through the image of a suffering individual, and Cowper showed the inadequacy of Thomson’s solution for newspaper readers in the age of empire, Melville tenaciously explores both the impulse to understand another’s suffering and the obstacles that impede that understanding in the hopes of finding a way to some partial insight. He does not so much critique human limitation as try to work within it, since the rhetoric of war that people share—poetic traditions and current poetic practices, the proliferation of journalistic reportage in all its heterogeneity—is the only available medium of communication.
Though U.S. Civil War poetry acknowledges and draws from a British poetic tradition of imagining war at a distance via figures of the weather, coterminous and cooperative developments in technologies of killing and communication demand new figurations of the climates of war. If reading the newspaper generates dislocated feelings on the part of readers remote from their nation’s conflicts, the increasingly rapid and continuous transmission of information—what Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. calls “perpetual intercommunication” via national “nervous networks”—intensifies the strangeness; Holmes tells us that readers of the news experience a version of the “war fever” that soldiers experience in battle.74 If soldiers are overwhelmed by the proximity of massive violence, readers at home are overwhelmed by a continuous bombardment of information about bombardments. The problem of remoteness is complicated by the fact that the Civil War was both far and near, internal and external, at home and abroad, depending on one’s geographical location, Union or Confederate perspective, and personal investments. Receiving news of war at a distance prevented readers from fully distinguishing between internal and external states of mind and country.
While all the poets discussed express skepticism over the possibility of perfect understanding between onlookers and sufferers, they nevertheless foreground a universal tendency—of poetry, journalism, reporters, poets, soldiers, and listeners—to create meaning in events by forging imaginative relations. The trope of choice is metaphor. Metaphor, after all, has its root in the idea of transport; it is suited to reconfiguring significance within circulatory networks. To establish relations between inner and outer states, all the poems, and all the players in the poem “Donelson,” metaphorize their surroundings. They do this in particular via the weather. A single line serves as an example: “The lancing sleet cut him who stared into the storm.”75 After an immersion in the atmospheric approach of “Donelson” to linguistic representation, it is clear that metaphor is at work here, but it is unclear what is the tenor and what is the vehicle: Does a soldier stare into an actual storm, weaponizing it in his reverie? Does a listener stare into the storm of war? Are we readers staring at a stormy poem that throws “a shower of broken ice and snow, / In lieu of words”?76 Interior and exterior states, states of mind and states of weather, battlefield attacks and storms, all run together, the “way a river flows / And there the whelming waters meet.”77 In Civil War poetry, the coincident, interpenetrating, and transitive circulation of weather, troops, and news generates instabilities in the metaphoric and symbolic properties of language; poetry’s task is to reconfigure expression so that even at a distance, war can make an impression.
Chapter 2
The “Ghastly Harvest”
The pastoral tradition is well suited to explore war’s environmental devastation, but only if poets strain the tradition to accommodate the sorts of scenarios it consistently denies; otherwise, the poems themselves offer a form of denial. Imagery of harvest time was ubiquitous in Civil War poetry. Autumnal poetic traditions offered a vocabulary with which to compare mass death in wartime—the “ghastly harvest”—with natural cycles signifying perpetual renewal.1 This chapter explores the ways that writers adapt the conventions of autumn poetry to the conditions of war. Claiming “that the pastoral and picturesque aesthetics were important in the constitution of nationalist ideology in the antebellum period,” Timothy Sweet stresses the ways that Walt Whitman and others “mobilize the idealized representation of the Union encoded in these aesthetics to heal the wounds of war and to envision the restoration of the nation” at the cost of acknowledging the physical reality of mass death.2 Interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ – ” offer a counterpoint to this formulation. Tyler Hoffman, David Cody, Faith Barrett, and others have read the poem as a critique of war, one that so strongly associates the red leaves of autumn with the bloodshed of Antietam (whose name echoes the season) that it is impossible to imagine the poem as an innocent meditation on New England fall: the tenor overrides the vehicle.3 But as is often the case with her poetry, Dickinson’s “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ – ” is understood as an exception to a more general practice. According to Barrett, for example, “what separates Dickinson’s poem from its popular counterparts … is Dickinson’s refusal to read battlefield bloodshed as a cycle of redemptive suffering for the nation that is endorsed by God.”4 This chapter demonstrates that the evocation of the pastoral in poems of the period doesn’t necessarily support national ideology, nor must it serve as a means of creating escapist fantasies that evade the acknowledgement of war’s human or environmental tolls. On the other hand, the poems examined in this chapter do not uniformly critique war’s carnage. Instead, I identify a broad range of ways this aesthetic is used. Through figures of autumn, some poets affirm the righteousness of the Northern cause, while others raise questions about nature’s regenerative powers, the possibility of human extinction, God’s existence, and whether poetry has lost its relevance