Drum-Taps

At dead of night, news from the South strikes Manhattan—and by daybreak the city is pouring into the streets, its workmen, lawyers and boys answering the drums. Walt Whitman hears the old sounds of peace vanish beneath the bugles.

Written amid the American Civil War and published in 1865, Drum-Taps begins with a city transformed: opera gives way to drum and fife, shops empty, mothers kiss sons goodbye, and bright cannons roll toward the wharves. Whitman’s voice surges with the crowds’ fierce welcome for battle, yet the hospital’s lint and bandages are already part of the scene. These poems follow the war’s call into the lives it interrupts, where patriotic fervor meets grief, fear and the work of tending the wounded. When the drums command everyone to rise, what can a poet sing that will hold both the cry of battle and its human cost?

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