Uploaded March 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Here's a virtual movie of the ghreat Walt Whitman reading his post American civil war poem "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing"
This poem by Walt Whitman was originally published in his 1865 anthology Drum-Taps, though This work once again introduces an abstract mother figure like the one seen in “Columbia,” but the marked difference here is that this figure is not aligned with a particular political outlook or nation. She is the “Mother of All,” linked to the earth that all men inhabit, and the sons she laments are not only Union or only Confederate soldiers, but all of the young men lost during the war. This poem reflects Whitman’s humanist interests and his democratic view of the equal worth of all people, regardless of social position or ideology, an idea that he explores at length in his poem “Leaves of Grass.” Furthermore, though this mother figure is abstracted, the poem is as invested in physical intimacy between mother and child as the broadsides examined. While the “Mother of All” cannot embrace or kiss these young men, she can “absorb” their “beautiful bodies.” Her entreaty to the earth, an extension of herself, to “let not an atom be lost” reflects the Mother of All’s ability to hold onto these fallen soldiers and achieve a sense of oneness with them in the way that the mother of “Come Up From the Fields Father” can only long for. Though death is not glorified in a political context as it is in “A Mother’s Hymn in Time of War,” this poem shares a depiction of death that is not purely negative or tragic. The final lines– “O my dead, an aroma sweet! / Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence”– suggest that there there is beauty in death and the oneness with nature and the “Mother of All” that it offers.
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2015
Here's a virtual movie of the ghreat Walt Whitman reading his post American civil war poem "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing"
This poem by Walt Whitman was originally published in his 1865 anthology Drum-Taps, though This work once again introduces an abstract mother figure like the one seen in “Columbia,” but the marked difference here is that this figure is not aligned with a particular political outlook or nation. She is the “Mother of All,” linked to the earth that all men inhabit, and the sons she laments are not only Union or only Confederate soldiers, but all of the young men lost during the war. This poem reflects Whitman’s humanist interests and his democratic view of the equal worth of all people, regardless of social position or ideology, an idea that he explores at length in his poem “Leaves of Grass.” Furthermore, though this mother figure is abstracted, the poem is as invested in physical intimacy between mother and child as the broadsides examined. While the “Mother of All” cannot embrace or kiss these young men, she can “absorb” their “beautiful bodies.” Her entreaty to the earth, an extension of herself, to “let not an atom be lost” reflects the Mother of All’s ability to hold onto these fallen soldiers and achieve a sense of oneness with them in the way that the mother of “Come Up From the Fields Father” can only long for. Though death is not glorified in a political context as it is in “A Mother’s Hymn in Time of War,” this poem shares a depiction of death that is not purely negative or tragic. The final lines– “O my dead, an aroma sweet! / Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence”– suggest that there there is beauty in death and the oneness with nature and the “Mother of All” that it offers.
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2015
