Walt Whitman served in field hospitals during the American Civil War (1861-1865), and he wrote extensively about his experience in both poems and essays.
Walt Whitman’s “Reconciliation” consists of six lines. The lines are long and unwieldy—the third line has to be broken for almost any page. Far from ever professing a morose or melancholy view, Whitman was able to see in the overall scheme of things that death is an integral part of life: the poem reconciles life and death as well as friend and enemy.
Cosmic claim
“Reconciliation” makes a cosmic claim in the first line, “Word over all, beautiful as the sky.” “Word” alludes to “the Word” as it is used in the beginning of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
The speaker avers that God is “over all.” He then focuses on the limited space of humanity, claiming that something is “as beautiful as the sky.” And then he addresses his specific subject: “Beautiful as war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost.”
Despite the death and destruction that war engenders, it is a beautiful fact that eventually those evil “deeds of carnage” will disappear. The sky implies the beauty that is “the Word” (or vibration) of God, and the beauty that is lost in war will return, because war “in time” loses its hold completely.
Death a cleanser
Line three continues the claim, stating that it is also beautiful “[t]hat the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, / and ever again, this soil'd world.” Personifying “Death and Night” as sisters who cleanse the dirt from the world, the speaker offers further evidence of deliverance from the “deeds of carnage.”
That bad things happen on this physical plane is undeniable, but that the bad things are corrected is beautiful. “Death” gives the tired soul a respite from the torment of earth life as “night” gives rest to the body.
Love your enemies
In line four, the speaker makes a startling statement: “For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.” It is difficult for the ordinary mind to grasp that an enemy is, like one’s self, a child of God. But Whitman’s speaker does comprehend and also does as the Christ commands, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” (Matthew 5:43-44)
The speaker approaches the dead enemy in his coffin, and instead of cursing him and taking joy in his death as the ordinary person would do, the speaker proceeds to “Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.” He kisses the face of the enemy.
Commentary
Whitman’s short lyric relies on few poetic devices. Apart of the opening allusion and personification of Death and Night as sisters, the poem is fairly literal. It does employ alliteration in the same line as the personification: “the hands of the sisters . . . incessantly softly wash . . . the soil’d world.” The many alliterative sibilant sounds enforce the meaning of the claim that the hands wash the “soil’d world.” The sounds seem to inundate the sentence as water would inundate as it cleanses.
Repetition of the –ld sound in “soil’d world” emphasizes the physical plane’s uncleanliness, because the words are a near rime. Also, repetition of “is dead” in line four reinforces the finality that death has brought to the victim.
Another Whitman article: Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing’: An American Tribute
