At some point, [Whitman] penciled a note on the script of the unpublished [poem] "Pictures": "Break all this into several pictures." That is, break open the casque of consciousness in which the images floated . . . and declare its single perceptions to be poems. Several poems from the Calamus sequence, like . . . "A Glimpse," are moving toward independence from the sponsoring mind. . . . In such poems, the order of observation implies a statement of sorts. . . . "A Glimpse" advances from outside to inside, from noisy barroom to quiet nook, from coarse camaraderie to silent intimacy.

[T]he (male) speaker of ["A Glimpse"] feels perfectly at home in the atmosphere of charged male sexuality (drinking, swearing, and "smutty jest"), although (one might say) he and his lover inhabit this sexually charged atmosphere differently from the way their fellows do. Hence the split subjectivity of this text: what is disencrypted in this lyric is what is invisible to the fleeting passerby and even to the denizens of the tavern as they "com[e] and go[ ]": the strong current of erotic intersubjectivity shared by the male couple who sit quietly together for "a long while."

Legislated Union, in the wake of failed resolutions and bloody compromises, seemed more than ever a contradiction in terms, a premonition given added vehemence in "For You O Democracy". . . . It goes without saying that these pious exhorations count as little more than stop-gap measures, wishful prophecies whose inflated optimism is portentous in its own right.

In one declamatory poem in the "Calamus" section, "For You O Democracy," he does attempt to celebrate "the manly love of comrades" for its contribution to the social cause of democratic idealism.

Whitman's increased emphasis on adhesiveness was also a response to the deep cultural fear among Northerners and Southerners alike that dismemberment would give rise to a civil or military dictatorship. In poem no. 5 (''For You 0 Democracy"), Whitman invokes the Union as something more than a legal compact that could be held together by the machinations of lawyers or the use of arms:

States!

Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?

By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

Whitman now offers his reader a radiant scene depicted with the objectivity and detail of such paintings by Thomas Eakins as "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull" or "The Swimming Hole." Both poem and paintings feature young men in a variety of activities: sporting on the grass, rowing in shells on the Schuylkill, shooting in marshes, and sailing before the winds. Whitman had always admired the candor and uncompromising reality of Eakins's paintings.

[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]