Video
Walt Whitman's Ode to the Unknown Soldier
Transcript
Hey guys. How's it going? Ranger James here with Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Today is a lovely day at the park. I'm standing here next to the gravesite of our unknown soldier. You'll see an enclosement made of wood with a pile of rocks marking the grave, as well as the grave marker itself which says, Unknown U.S Soldier. Behind me the trail is going through some woods. We're actually down here at what's known as the Dead Angle which is one of the tour stops on our driving tour.
But today I'm going to be reading an excerpt from Walt Whitman's 'Memoranda During the War'. And Walt Whitman, as many of you know, was a famous poet. Actually during the Civil War his brother was injured during a battle and he took it upon himself to become a nurse and he helped nurse some of the Union wounded up near in the Washington DC area. But as part of this book he made sure to mention the sacrifices that were made by the dead and specifically those that were left unknown from the battles. So I'm going to be reading that expert, excerpt here.
" 'The Million Dead, too, summ'd up - The Unknown.' --The Dead in this War-- there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the South -Virginia, the Peninsula- Malvern Hill and Fair Oaks- the banks of the Chickahominy- the terraces of Fredericksburg- Antietam bridge- "the grizzly ravines of Manassas - the bloody promenade of the wilderness - the varieties of the strayed dead, (the estimate of the War Department is 25,000 National soldiers kill'd in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown'd -15,000 inhumed by strangers or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities--2,000 graves cover'd by sand and mud, by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, etc) --Gettysburg, the West, Southwest-- Vicksburg-- Chattanooga-- the trenches of Petersburg-- the numberless battles, camps, Hospitals everywhere-- the crop reap'd by the mighty reapers, Typhoid, Dysentery, Inflammations-- and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial- pits, the prison pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, etc, (not Dante's pictured Hell in all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments, excell'd those Prisons)--the dead, the dead, the dead-- our dead-- or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me) or East or West-- Atlantic Coast or Mississippi Valley-- Somewhere they crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gulleys, or on the sides of hills-- (there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach'd bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found, yet)--our young men once so handsome and so joyous taken from us--the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend-- the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee-- the single graves in the woods or by the road-side, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)-- the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down the Upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburg)-- some lie at the bottom of the sea-- the general Million, and the special Cemeteries in almost all the States-- the Infinite Dead-- (the land entire is saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and shall be so forever, and every grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw,)-- not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil-- thousands, aye many tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth. And everywhere among these countless graves-- everywhere in the many Soldiers Cemeteries of the Nation,(there are over seventy of them)--'at the time' as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles-- not only were the scathing trail pass'd those years, but radiating since and all the peaceful quarters of the land-- we see, and see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, "singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word. 'Unknown' "(In some of the Cemeteries nearly 'all' the dead are Unknown. As Salisbury, North Carolina, for instance, the known are only 85, while the Unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A National Monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot-- but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?) "As I write this conclusion-- in the open air, latter part of June, 1875, a delicious forenoon, everything rich and fresh from last night's copious rain-- ten years and more have pass'd away since that War, and its wholesale deaths, burials, graves. ('They' make indeed the true Memoranda of the War-- mute subtle, immortal.) From ten years' rain and snow, in their seasons-- grass, clover, pine trees, orchards, forests-- from all the noiseless miracles of soil and sun and running streams-- how peaceful and how beautiful appear to-day even the Battle Trenches, and the many hundred thousand Cemetery mounds! Even at Andersonville, to-day, innocence and a smile. (A late account says, 'The stockade has fallen to decay, is grown upon, and a season more will efface it entirely, except from our hearts and memories. The 'dead line,' over which so many brave soldiers pass'd to the freedom of eternity rather than endure the misery of life, can only be traced here and there, for most of the old marks the last ten years have obliterated. "The thirty-five wells, which the prisoners dug with cups and spoons, remain just as they were left. And the wonderful spring which was discover'd one morning, after a thunderstorm, "flowing down the hillside, still yields its sweet, pure water as freely now as then. "The Cemetery, with its thirteen thousand graves, is on the slope of a beautiful hill. "Over the quiet spot already trees give the cool shade which would have been so gratefully sought by the poor fellows whose lives were ended under the scorching sun.') And now, to the thought of these-- on these graves of the dead of the War, "as on an altar-- to memory of these, or North or South, I close and dedicate my book."
I like to thank you guys for joining me today for this reading and I hope to see you next time.
Description
In this video, Ranger James reads from Walt Whitman's "Memoranda During the War" describing the author's feelings towards the unknown dead of the American Civil War.
Duration
6 minutes, 30 seconds
Credit
NPS / J. Pratt
Date Created
06/12/2021
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