[T]he poet recognizes that the two men did share a reciprocal love that, just possibly, kept them going . . . and thus enabled them to find something of value in the war. The war made the relationship possible, and it gave the friendship, perhaps, a depth and immediacy it might not have had in other circumstances. Therefore, the surviving comrade will remember the personal I-Thou relationship that did exist, as well as recall the death that deprived him of his friend. The old soldier maintains a vigil that is at once a lament and a celebration.

"Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" poses a . . . critique of sentimental paradigms. . . . Strikingly absent from the poem are the capitalized abstractions of other poems in Drum-Taps—"Democracy," "Columbia," "Libertad"—ideological constructs that would subsume the anomaly of the soldier’s death and validate the prosecution of the war. The poem is silent on those subjects, and its withholding, its "vigil of silence," guards against appropriating the soldier within overarching providential or historical designs. The poem disclaims that appropriation.

The intense bonds of compassion, comradeship, and love that Whitman witnessed and formed among the soldiers were a source of democratic sustenance amid the blood-drenched scenes of war. These loving bonds formed by men at war also gave Whitman a positive language and social form in which to experience and articulate his own homosexual desire.

The best war poem in Drum-Taps concerns Whitman’s vigil beside the body of his fallen comrade. "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" opens at the moment his comrade falls wounded; the two men look at each other with shocked eyes, and their helpless love passes through their fleeting touch. The wound that is mortal for one man is immortal for the other.

[Cavitch quotes the first six lines of the poem]

Whitman depicts another of the conventional situations of the war's poetry--the battlefield at night, littered with the slain. But he does not stop with the convention. He invests himself completely in the person of the soldier who keeps watch beside his dead son: . . .

. . . "Arthur Peyton," describes another worker's body in the act of assuming the characteristics of his materials, this time employing more explicitly technological imagery. The speaker, also a miner with silicosis, asks the woman he would have married to testify for him—"O love tell the committee that I know"—so that she can project his haunting, ghostly voice into the official avenues of the legal system. He describes himself and his world taken over by glass, in volatile images that suggest the speaker's faltering hold on language and on life:

Rukeyser presents this allure as superficial, sinister, deceptive:

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster's

stance with his gun smoking and out is not so

vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.

 

Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills

narrow to this, clouds over every town

finally indicate the stored destruction. (OS 28)

As she gathers momentum, Rukeyser amplifies the religious and political implications of "Alloy" in the crucial sequence, "Power" and "The Dam." Before she moves into the depths, first of the powerhouse, then of the dam, in "Power" (pp. 49-53) Rukeyser draws on the resources of classical poetic forms and language to bring alive the setting: "the quick sun," the warm mountains, a vital, sexualized landscape that answers to the love and sexualized body of the poet who "sees perfect cliffs ranging until the river / cuts sheer, mapped far below in delicate track, / surprise of grace .

The lyrical "Power" section begins on an unabashedly aestheticizing note; we soon learn, however, that the plant is built upon—and literally covers over—a darker, more complex version of "power." Rukeyser at first describes the power plant as a harmonious element of a beautiful natural landscape. She anthropomorphizes its graceful, even delicate form: "Steel-bright, light-pointed, the narrow-waisted towers / lift their protective network . . . / gymnast, they poise their freight" (OS 29).

We are meant to hold these clusters of meaning in the mind as they reveal the fullness of reality. Some of the meanings the poet is allowing to expand into their conteallations are these: in "Power" death is both finality and source of power; but in another sense, one cannot say that power has any source, any beginning or end -- thus the first line of "The Dam." But that line is followed by

Rises

in the green season, in the sudden season

the white the budded

    and the lost.