Battle Lines. Eliza Richards

      “Strange Analogies”

      Weathering the War

      Walt Whitman entitles a passage he wrote during the last year of the war, and then included in Specimen Days, with a question: “The Weather—Does it Sympathize with These Times?”

      Whether the rains, the heat and cold, and what underlies them all, are affected with what affects man in masses, and follow his play of passionate actions, strain’d stronger than usual, and on a larger scale than usual—whether this, or not;—it is certain that there is now, and has been for twenty months or more, on this American continent north, many a remarkable, many an unprecedented expression of the subtile world of air above us and around us. There, since this war, and the wide and deep national agitation, strange analogies, different combinations, a different sunlight, or absence of it; different products even out of the ground. After every great battle, a great storm. Even civic events the same.¹

      M. Wynn Thomas tells us that this passage “brings us back to the semi-science of meteorology in Whitman’s day, a ‘science’ uneasily (but fruitfully for a poet) suspended between a new materialist and an old spiritual-animist view of the world.”² That uneasy suspension between two conceptions inspires Whitman’s speculation about the meaning of weather in wartime: do storms in the sky sympathetically correspond to the passionate actions of “man in masses”? Are wars on earth generating storms in the air? Is the sky trying to tell us something, or are we reading something into it? The “unprecedented expression of the subtile world of air above us, around us” may reflect our own inchoate feelings projected outward, or it may be a message from an animate world that feels with us. At any rate, the Civil War, according to Whitman, has affected the ways people understand the weather; it has inspired “strange analogies, different combinations, a different sunlight, or absences of it.” Indeed, it seems to have generated a certain confusion about what is the figure and what is the ground, what is literal and what is metaphoric, what is sunlight and what is its analogue. Something is in the air during the Civil War, and it causes poets to look up and try to read its message in the sky.

      Whitman is by no means alone in turning to the weather to try to make sense of war. In Civil War poems, 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. Mary Favret has traced such a tradition in English poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrating that poets such as William Cowper, Anna Barbauld, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge think through the question of “war at a distance” via the weather. England’s empire building, Favret argues, inspires poets to read the weather—in particular harsh, winter weather—as a way of thinking through what it means to be a citizen of a nation perpetually at war abroad. Remote wars pressure English poets to find a way of relating distant events to present experiences, especially in sensory terms; the weather provides a medium for such meditations.³ With some key differences—the American conflict is staged within the boundaries of a nation that has become two—Favret’s insights hold true for U.S. Civil War poetry, which recognizes and refers to an English tradition. More particularly, Civil War poetry of all kinds—Northern and Southern, popular and experimental, broadly or narrowly circulated—draws sustained parallels between weather and the circulation and reception of news in wartime. The consistent association over time of the lethal capacities of winter storms with war suggests that in one way, war resists history by annihilating force (that is one of Favret’s central points).⁴ But the change in these figurations also shows that the interdependent development of technologies of communication and of killing transform the way that writers think about weather, war, and the functions and possibilities of poetry.

      By the second year of the conflict, when it became clear that the South would not easily give up its fight to establish a new nation, and when the death tolls mounted to unprecedented highs, poetry was used increasingly as a way of thinking through the aesthetics and ethics of distant violence. For it was a paradoxical effect of the rapid transmission of information from the battlefronts made possible by telegraph and railway networks that people on the home front became acutely aware that others were fighting and dying for them elsewhere. On a daily basis, the lists of the dead published in local newspapers, along with images and reports of battles in a range of local and national periodicals, confronted civilians with their own relative safety, gained at the cost of the lives of others. What to make of this situation—how to feel when strangers die for you, how to imagine mass death at a distance, how to visualize invisible suffering—these are some of the pressing topics in much Civil War poetry.

      The weather mattered on both literal and figurative levels of signification, and those levels were inextricably linked in Civil War journalism and the poetry inspired by it. Weather was first of all an important condition of battle. As a writer remarked in an essay entitled “Weather in War,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, “It is not very flattering to that glory-loving, battle-seeking creature, Man, that his best-arranged schemes for the destruction of his fellows should often be made to fail by the condition of the weather.”⁵ In a war fought primarily in southern climates that differ starkly from those of the North, unpredictable weather more than once contributed to the Union army’s difficulties in unknown terrain: heavy rains, mud, extreme heat, and sudden shifts from hot to freezing temperatures caused problems with over-exposure, implementing strategic initiatives, and recovering the wounded from battlefields (fig. 4).⁶ The differences in weather between the North and South were ripe for interpretation in terms of the incompatible political and cultural character of two peoples, especially when scientific theories of the time attributed a people’s character to the climate they lived in: southerners were supposedly more hot-blooded and emotional, northerners more temperate and rational.⁷ As much as climate separates and differentiates, however, observing the weather allows those differences to be physically imagined at a distance, at least according to Civil War poets: watching snowflakes fall in Massachusetts, for example, summons the thought of soldiers falling on Southern battlefields in uncountable numbers. The U.S. Civil War was external and internal simultaneously, because one nation threatened to become two. What was far away for Northern civilians could be in the backyard of their Southern counterparts, so that proximity and distance are held in a complex, ever-shifting relation, and the weather reports in newspapers and poetry of the period tried to chart and make sense of these dynamics.