by Whitman · Cluster: Grief and Loss · Elegy · Clothing and Costume
Abstract
A brief lyric of the poet shaken by a year of defeat, asking whether he must now chant cold dirges and hymns of defeat; war, grief and the poet’s vocation.
Connections
Motifs: Music and Song Themes & Concepts: Grief and Loss, Disillusionment, War and its Cost Forms & Genres: Dirge
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: DRUM-TAPS
Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me! Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me, Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? And sullen hymns of defeat?