Ashes of Soldiers

Ashes of Soldiers

by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Ashes of soldiers!

As I muse, retrospective, murmuring a chant in thought,

Lo! the war resumes - again to my sense your shapes,

And again the advance of armies.

Noiseless as mists and vapors,

From their graves in the trenches ascending,

From the cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee,

From every point of the compass, out of the countless unnamed graves,

In wafted clouds, in myriads large, or in squads of twos or threes, or single ones they come, 

And silently gather around me...

The second poem I choose to highlight is the piece titled Ashes of Soldiers. As the entire piece was too large to fit, only the first two staves are shown in this post. 

Ashes of Soldiers is a different kind of memorial poem, told in a more prose and free-style format than what most would expect. The setting is a graveyard, likely during an afternoon stroll. Upon contemplating the war memorials that are scattered around a particular area of the graveyard, the writer's perception of the wars (though he himself was not involved in them) is so vivid it almost seems the memories of the soldiers who were killed in battle were coming to life in front of him, becoming like spirits, surrounding him and, to an extent, protecting him.

This is very similar in concept to a piece I heard last year, which is partially why I chose this piece, but this has a much deeper meaning, and a much deeper context. Unlike in the piece I have heard prior to reading this, there is a much more vivid description - as vivid, perhaps, as what is going on in the writer's mind at that moment - of what actually occurred there, in contrast to simply stating they were actually there. There is a more vivid picture in the reader's mind of the scenario, and Whitman does a very good job of providing the imagery necessary for the poem to be brought to its full effect.