For me Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson are the two great—and importantly distinctive—American poets. Whitman swaggers, sings, and saunters across all the vastness and plurality of America, while Dickinson sits in a room in Massachusetts and pulls magical spells out of her head. I’ve rolled through pages of Whitman, travelling with him, but I discovered this poem only a few weeks ago. Whitman stands beside the Mother of All, who for me is Nature not Mary of Nazareth, looks over a field filled with corpses after a Civil War battle and with the gift that only poets (whether they write, sing, paint, or compose) have to “make sense” of what he sees. I put “makes sense” in inverted commas because how can anybody make sense of thousands of corpses of young men, but he does. The Mother of All commands “all you essences of soil and growth” to “absorb them well.” And “many a year hence” they will return “In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass” and “in blowing airs from the fields.” Next time I stand on the site of a battle of long ago I will recite this poem. I have never looked on a field of corpses and hope I never will, but I know that many in the world will do so today.

I heard the Mother of All

Pensive, on her dead gazing, I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate, on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the
battle-fields gazing;
As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she
stalk’d:
Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried—I charge you,
lose not my sons! lose not an atom;
And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear
blood;
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above
lightly,
And all you essences of soil and growth—and you, O
my rivers’ depths;
And you mountain sides—and the woods where my
dear children’s blood, trickling, redden’d;
And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all
future trees,
My dead absorb—my young men’s beautiful bodies ab-
sorb—and their precious, precious, precious
blood;
Which holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give
me, many a year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centu-
ries hence;
In blowing airs from the fields, back again give me my
darlings—give my immortal heroes;
Exhale me them centuries hence—breathe me their
breath—let not an atom be lost;
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an
aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial, sweet death, years, centuries
hence.