by Whitman · Cluster: Identity · Free Verse · Eternal Return
Abstract
A self-portrait lyric: not youth, beauty or learning, but the nursing of dying soldiers and the making of these songs belong to the speaker; the poet as wartime nurse.
Connections
Motifs: Music and Song Themes & Concepts: War and its Cost, Comradeship, Identity Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: DRUM-TAPS
Not youth pertains to me,
Nor delicatesse, I cannot beguile the time with talk,
Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant,
In the learn’d coterie sitting constrain’d and still, for learning
inures not to me,
Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me—yet there are two or three things
inure to me,
I have nourish’d the wounded and sooth’d many a dying soldier,
And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp,
Composed these songs.