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Chapter 1

“Strange Analogies”

Weathering the War

Walt Whitman entitles a passage he wrote during the last year of the war, and then included in Specimen Days, with a question: “The Weather—Does it Sympathize with These Times?”

Whether the rains, the heat and cold, and what underlies them all, are affected with what affects man in masses, and follow his play of passionate actions, strain’d stronger than usual, and on a larger scale than usual—whether this, or not;—it is certain that there is now, and has been for twenty months or more, on this American continent north, many a remarkable, many an unprecedented expression of the subtile world of air above us and around us. There, since this war, and the wide and deep national agitation, strange analogies, different combinations, a different sunlight, or absence of it; different products even out of the ground. After every great battle, a great storm. Even civic events the same.¹

M. Wynn Thomas tells us that this passage “brings us back to the semi-science of meteorology in Whitman’s day, a ‘science’ uneasily (but fruitfully for a poet) suspended between a new materialist and an old spiritual-animist view of the world.”² That uneasy suspension between two conceptions inspires Whitman’s speculation about the meaning of weather in wartime: do storms in the sky sympathetically correspond to the passionate actions of “man in masses”? Are wars on earth generating storms in the air? Is the sky trying to tell us something, or are we reading something into it? The “unprecedented expression of the subtile world of air above us, around us” may reflect our own inchoate feelings projected outward, or it may be a message from an animate world that feels with us. At any rate, the Civil War, according to Whitman, has affected the ways people understand the weather; it has inspired “strange analogies, different combinations, a different sunlight, or absences of it.” Indeed, it seems to have generated a certain confusion about what is the figure and what is the ground, what is literal and what is metaphoric, what is sunlight and what is its analogue. Something is in the air during the Civil War, and it causes poets to look up and try to read its message in the sky.

Whitman is by no means alone in turning to the weather to try to make sense of war. In Civil War poems, the coincident, interpenetrating, and transitive circulation of weather, troops, and news generates instabilities in the metaphoric and symbolic properties of language; poetry’s task is to reconfigure expression so that even at a distance, war can make an impression. Mary Favret has traced such a tradition in English poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrating that poets such as William Cowper, Anna Barbauld, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge think through the question of “war at a distance” via the weather. England’s empire building, Favret argues, inspires poets to read the weather—in particular harsh, winter weather—as a way of thinking through what it means to be a citizen of a nation perpetually at war abroad. Remote wars pressure English poets to find a way of relating distant events to present experiences, especially in sensory terms; the weather provides a medium for such meditations.³ With some key differences—the American conflict is staged within the boundaries of a nation that has become two—Favret’s insights hold true for U.S. Civil War poetry, which recognizes and refers to an English tradition. More particularly, Civil War poetry of all kinds—Northern and Southern, popular and experimental, broadly or narrowly circulated—draws sustained parallels between weather and the circulation and reception of news in wartime. The consistent association over time of the lethal capacities of winter storms with war suggests that in one way, war resists history by annihilating force (that is one of Favret’s central points).⁴ But the change in these figurations also shows that the interdependent development of technologies of communication and of killing transform the way that writers think about weather, war, and the functions and possibilities of poetry.

By the second year of the conflict, when it became clear that the South would not easily give up its fight to establish a new nation, and when the death tolls mounted to unprecedented highs, poetry was used increasingly as a way of thinking through the aesthetics and ethics of distant violence. For it was a paradoxical effect of the rapid transmission of information from the battlefronts made possible by telegraph and railway networks that people on the home front became acutely aware that others were fighting and dying for them elsewhere. On a daily basis, the lists of the dead published in local newspapers, along with images and reports of battles in a range of local and national periodicals, confronted civilians with their own relative safety, gained at the cost of the lives of others. What to make of this situation—how to feel when strangers die for you, how to imagine mass death at a distance, how to visualize invisible suffering—these are some of the pressing topics in much Civil War poetry.

The weather mattered on both literal and figurative levels of signification, and those levels were inextricably linked in Civil War journalism and the poetry inspired by it. Weather was first of all an important condition of battle. As a writer remarked in an essay entitled “Weather in War,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, “It is not very flattering to that glory-loving, battle-seeking creature, Man, that his best-arranged schemes for the destruction of his fellows should often be made to fail by the condition of the weather.”⁵ In a war fought primarily in southern climates that differ starkly from those of the North, unpredictable weather more than once contributed to the Union army’s difficulties in unknown terrain: heavy rains, mud, extreme heat, and sudden shifts from hot to freezing temperatures caused problems with over-exposure, implementing strategic initiatives, and recovering the wounded from battlefields (fig. 4).⁶ The differences in weather between the North and South were ripe for interpretation in terms of the incompatible political and cultural character of two peoples, especially when scientific theories of the time attributed a people’s character to the climate they lived in: southerners were supposedly more hot-blooded and emotional, northerners more temperate and rational.⁷ As much as climate separates and differentiates, however, observing the weather allows those differences to be physically imagined at a distance, at least according to Civil War poets: watching snowflakes fall in Massachusetts, for example, summons the thought of soldiers falling on Southern battlefields in uncountable numbers. The U.S. Civil War was external and internal simultaneously, because one nation threatened to become two. What was far away for Northern civilians could be in the backyard of their Southern counterparts, so that proximity and distance are held in a complex, ever-shifting relation, and the weather reports in newspapers and poetry of the period tried to chart and make sense of these dynamics.

Figure 4. “March of the Army of the Potomac towards Richard’s Ford, Rappahannock River, under General Burnside, interrupted by the storm of Wednesday, January 21.—From a Sketch by our Special Artist,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 14, 1863, 328–329. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

In “The Snow at Fredericksburg,” for example, published on January 31, 1863, the anonymous author uses the snowfall to draw together the enormous number of dead Union soldiers and their mourners over the distance between the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862) and the Northern home front. The speaker addresses the snow:

And here, where lieth the high of heart,

Drift—white as the bridal veil—

That will never be worn by the drooping girl

Who sitteth afar, so pale.

Fall, fast as the tears of the suffering wife,

Who stretcheth despairing hands

Out to the blood-rich battle-fields

That crimson the Eastern sands!

Fall in thy virgin tenderness,

Oh delicate snow, and cover

The graves of our heroes, sanctified

Husband and son and lover!

Drift tenderly over those yellow slopes,

And mellow our deep distress,

And put us in mind of the shriven souls

And their mantles of righteousness!⁸

Versatile in its amorphous whiteness, the snow offers myriad “strange analogies”: a ghostly version of the bridal veil the girl will not wear, of the widow’s tears, of the sanctification the buried soldiers lack. It whitens the crimson blood, it reaches where the widow can’t, it softens sadness and stands for the heroism and virtue of the fallen soldiers. Snow didn’t fall during the Battle of Fredericksburg—a Confederate victory with huge death tolls—though the poem suggests that it fell afterward both at home and on the battlefield.⁹ The poem’s snow imaginatively counters the stark images of the dead in the illustrated newspapers, serving as an active response to the coverage of the war. The poet calls on the snow to soften the news of the unidentified dead far from home, to reach backward toward the news’ emergence in a gesture of mourning and patriotism (fig. 5).

This chapter examines a cluster of poems that adapt a meteorological poetic tradition to the particular circumstances of a civil war with enormous death tolls in a mass media age. Science of the period had recently come to understand weather as a global system, which meant that what goes around comes around: what is elsewhere will eventually arrive here, perhaps in altered form.¹⁰ The figure of snow set alongside its physical reality enables a poetic contemplation of war as a massive circulatory system that involves civilians and soldiers alike. The first section, “An Even Face,” follows the ways snow’s capacity for erasure summons the death tolls of Southern battlefields for Northern civilians, as well as their own insularity from immediate physical harm. The second section traces figures of weather in Confederate poet Henry Timrod’s work in order to demonstrate that poetry itself works like a circulatory system across sectional lines during the war; Timrod offers a response to a primarily northern tradition of snow poems, figuring the South as a nation well-fortified in preparation for the North’s fierce storms. The final section brings together North and South, home front and battlefront, snow and its tropes via an analysis of Herman Melville’s “Donelson,” a nuanced meditation on weather and war focused on a battle that took place in a deadly snowstorm. Unlike the other poems in the chapter, Melville’s demands of his reader a complete immersion in the details of the event as well as their widespread, multiply mediated circulation in order to begin understanding the complexities of media reception of war at a distance. The poem offers an occasion to think about the massive challenges confronting soldiers in the field as well as the conditions that necessarily impede civilian understanding. By stressing the immersion of soldiers and civilians in particular conditions at specific locations, Melville shows the way that war, weather, and media draw people together within overlapping circulatory systems in ways that are only partially knowable.

Figure 5. “The dead around the regimental flag of the 8th Ohio, in front of the ‘Stonewall’ at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Sketched by Our Special Artist, Arthur Lumley,” New York Illustrated News, January 10, 1863, 145. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

“An Even Face”

In 1726, James Thomson was already thinking about the problem of how to feel about suffering from a comfortable distance. In “Winter,” the first of the poems later collected in The Seasons, Thomson’s central concern is whether anyone cares for those who suffer elsewhere. The speaker imagines someone less fortunate than himself floundering and dying in a blizzard, then extrapolates from that scenario to wonder

How many feel, this very moment, death,

And all the sad variety of pain.

How many sink in the devouring flood,

Or more devouring flame. How many bleed,

By shameful variance betwixt man and man.¹¹

Thomson’s multiplication of “how manys” makes the point that neither he nor anyone else can “feel, this very moment” with multitudes suffering elsewhere. Their plights are so abstracted in his list that the poem charges common expressions of sympathy with failing to summon more than a general idea of a problem. His poetic solution to generality is to evoke an individual, sentimental scenario, “One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,” in the hopes that it will summon “the social tear … the social sigh,” which, in turn will make “the social passions work.”¹² Thomson raises the question of whether that scenario succeeds in making a reader feel.

Responding to “Winter” almost sixty years later, William Cowper’s “Winter’s Evening,” in The Task (1785), expresses skepticism about the ability of poetry to summon the social tear or the social sigh for distant suffering.¹³ He identifies the newspaper as the source of an enhanced indifference; his summary “argument of the fourth book” portrays a newly remote reader: “The post comes in. The newspaper is read. The world contemplated at a distance. Address to Winter.”¹⁴ The relation between the contemplation of the world and the address to winter is itself disjunct. Whereas Thomson summoned a swain who wallowed and died in the snow while others were warm and safe at home, Cowper’s suffering populations are only vaguely imagined; the subject of the poem is rather the newspaper reader’s lack of feeling, or even his pleasure in the remote suffering of others. The news messenger is the first to convey this “cold and yet cheerful” attitude: “Messenger of grief / Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some, / To him indifferent whether grief or joy.”¹⁵ For the recipient of the newspaper, the primary emotion is pleasurable curiosity. He looks forward to “wheel[ing] the sofa round” in front of the fire, “clos[ing] the shutters fast,” and vicariously experiencing the world’s news: “Is India free? And does she wear her plumed / And jeweled turban with a smile of peace, / Or do we grind her still?”¹⁶ Rather than contemplating the suffering of others, the speaker makes his subject his own vicarious emotions, strangely removed from the terrors he contemplates: “I behold the tumult and am still. The sound of war / Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me. Grieves but alarms me not.”¹⁷

However “pleasant” it is “through the loop-holes of retreat to peep at such a world,” the pleasure is accompanied by a sense of dislocated dread that emerges in the speaker’s depiction of the snow.¹⁸ After meditating on the news extensively, the speaker shifts his attention to the weather outside his window. There a transformation takes place that echoes the numbing of emotion that a mediated depiction of current events brings the newspaper reader:

Tomorrow brings a change, a total change!

Which even now, though silently perform’d

And slowly, and by most unfelt, the face

Of universal nature undergoes.¹⁹

“The face of universal nature undergoes” a smoothing of expression, an erasure of feeling, a transformation into blankness and indifference that marks and mirrors the unconscious horror of the comfortable reader in his unfeeling reception of the pain of others. However unconscious one is of current events, a change occurs that surpasses understanding and awareness; via the figure of snow, Cowper comments on the strangeness of this new world where war can lose its terrors in transmission.

Cowper’s “Winter Evening” left its mark on the American snow poems that followed in its wake. Before the Civil War, New England writers in particular took up the figure of snow in order to define an aesthetic indigenous to the region and the new nation. To do so, they implicitly contrasted Cowper’s comfortable fireside scene of contemplation with American poets who walk outside into the storm and experience the weather more directly. Emerson’s 1835 “The Snow-Storm” is a touchstone in this collective endeavor. Echoing Cowper’s poem in order to counter it, Emerson casts the north wind as a barbaric artist that, through the medium of snow, transforms the world into a whimsical architectural wonderland while people huddle together inside a farmhouse. His poem, like Cowper’s, starts with heraldic imagery of sounding horns; but whereas Cowper’s horns signal the arrival of a news carrier, Emerson’s trumpets are “of the sky.” The storm itself is the news rather than the impediment to the transmission of information, and it announces its own arrival:

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind’s masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.²⁰

Emerson briskly condenses Cowper’s elaborate fireside scenario into three lines. “Enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm,” the “housemates” are extraneous rather than central to the poem’s drama. The “mad night wind” replaces the contemplative patriarch in Cowper’s poem as the central agent. Enough traces of the distant wars underpinning Cowper’s meditation remain in Emerson’s poem to signal their active erasure. The wind’s transformation of the landscape is cast in militaristic terms: “trumpets of the sky” herald its arrival, and it quickly wrests the land from its human inhabitants, imprisons them indoors, and lays waste, albeit temporarily and playfully, to the competitors’ territory. Emerson has imported war’s energies into the metaphorical realm of art, purging them of tragic, literal associations so that they may serve to renovate and liberate the imagination.

The intense political discord that culminated in the U.S. Civil War rendered this liberation of the imagination from material circumstances and political exigencies obsolete almost as soon as it was formulated. Many writers of the ’50s and ’60s—including Emerson, eventually—returned to the question of poetry’s social responsibility, particularly to address the question of slavery and the possibility, and then reality, of civil war. This is Elizabeth Akers Allen’s starting point in “Snow,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the leading pro-Union periodicals, in February 1864, after the battles of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and others had claimed tens of thousands of lives.²¹ A prolific and popular poet who was perhaps better known under her pen name Florence Percy, Allen published poems in periodicals throughout the war; her “Rock Me to Sleep” was one of the most popular poems to emerge from the war years.²² She marked the climate of the conflict through the changing seasons in poems such as “Spring at the Capital,” in which the speaker imagines seeing blood on white flowers after looking at a “white encampment” in the distance, outside of Washington DC.²³ Explicitly working from formally experimental predecessors, both Emerson’s “Snow-Storm” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Snow-Flakes” of 1858, in “Snow” Allen smooths, tames, and shapes their work into tetrameter lines, balanced between iambs and trochees, with an unbroken abaab rhyme scheme. She revises Emerson’s depicted scenario as well, by putting things in their place:

Lo, what wonders the day hath brought,

Born of the soft and slumberous snow!

Gradual, silent, slowly wrought;—

Even as an artist, thought by thought,

Writes expression on lip and brow.

Hanging garlands the eaves o’erbrim,

Deep drifts smother the paths below;

The elms are shrouded, trunk and limb,

And all the air is dizzy and dim

With a whirl of dancing, dazzling snow.

So much for Emerson’s mad wind’s unruly disruption; we seem to have a highly conservative poet here, one who seeks to make her own poem a proper counterpoint to Emerson’s by offering a tidied version of the farm scene that his night wind messed up. Allen’s “soft and slumberous” snow hangs “garlands,” not on chicken coops and dog kennels, but appropriately, on the eaves of a house. Her snow etches an analogous double of the human gradually, silently, and slowly, “Even as an artist, thought by thought / Writes expression on lip and brow.” Less wildly ambivalent and unsettling than Emerson’s poem, Allen’s first stanzas personify nature so fully that he only knows how to sculpt a form as a human artist would. Harnessing and stabilizing Emerson’s night wind’s myriad-handed work, Allen’s poem gives the impression of reaching a conclusion by the end of the second stanza of a six-stanza poem.

A first hint of the return of war from its banishment to metaphor in Emerson’s earlier poem is the comparison of the snow to an artist who “writes expression on lip and brow”; the snow portrait recalls Cowper’s “universal face” from a “Winter’s Evening,” registering a displaced awareness of the numbness inflicted by the remote reception of violence. Upon consideration, the second stanza does not seem so cheery after all: the “dancing, dazzling snow” recedes, and Allen sketches a much starker picture. The “deep drifts smother the paths,” “the elms are shrouded, trunk and limb,” and even the air, “dizzy and dim,” seems unable to breathe. The poem takes a dark turn from there, beyond stasis to death and even killing. Allen’s poem, which at first dramatized the evasion of current events, becomes gripped by them; the whimsical scene of exterior decoration, fully evocative of Emerson’s earlier poem, warps into a nightmare vision in the next three stanzas:

Dimly out of the baffled sight

Houses and church-spires stretch away;

The trees, all spectral and still and white,

Stand up like ghosts in the failing light,

And fade and faint with the blinded day.

Down from the roofs in gusts are hurled

The eddying drifts to the waste below;

And still is the banner of storm unfurled,

Till all the drowned and desolate world

Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.

Slowly the shadows gather and fall,

Still the whispering snow-flakes beat;

Night and darkness are over all:

Rest, pale city, beneath their pall!

Sleep, white world, in thy winding-sheet!

The violence continues “Till all the drowned and desolate world / Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.” Rather than covering to re-create, like Emerson’s night wind, this windless snow smothers to kill, “hurls downward” to make and join “waste.” Allen depicts a total annihilation that wraps the entire world in a winding sheet. Her apocalyptic, depopulated poetic landscape supplants Emerson’s animating personifications.

The Civil War is the not-so-hidden subtext, disrupting the Emersonian aesthetic in which the imagination is free to remake the world in its own image without damage or cost. If we need more evidence, beyond the snow “hurled” down like missiles and laying “waste,” we might notice the corpselike description of the elms whose articulated parts, “trunk and limb,” summon the amputation and dismemberment so ubiquitous during the war. The “banner of storm,” stridently patriotic in its unrelenting demands, insists on continuing its siege until the entire “pale city” is buried in a single “winding-sheet” (the Civil War dead, especially regular infantry, were frequently buried in mass graves or left to the elements).²⁴

The speaker can still talk after the whole world has been destroyed, because, like Emerson’s “housemates,” she has sought shelter out of the storm in a room. Instead of Cowper’s comforting fire, Allen’s speaker stares at a picture of Rome and a wreath on her wall. Here the war surfaces fully as the subject of the poem, and the weather metaphor recedes:

Clouds may thicken, and storm-winds breathe:

On my wall is a glimpse of Rome;—

Land of my longing!—and underneath

Swings and trembles my olive-wreath;

Peace and I are at home, at home!

Shut in, a lone survivor, the speaker turns away from the present toward the ancient history of civilization in order to imagine a place “at home, at home” with peace. Even that dislocation from the natural world and the present moment, however, does not keep the threat of destruction at bay, for the very place she looks to reassure herself of the rise of civilization has fallen, as a result of war. The late eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon famously attributed the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” to barbarian invasions that were possible due to the loss of civic virtue.²⁵ Allen’s snow actively recalls Emerson’s frolic savagery in order to obliterate it, suggesting that poets, or at least her poem, can no longer use the natural world as a playground where the imagination is free to roam. The snow imposes a vision of mass death upon the speaker in spite of herself, one she seeks to escape. Bunkered in her home, she assembles pieces into a collage-like figure of a shrine—a picture of Rome in place of the world outside her window, an olive-wreath beneath—shoring up fragments in a vain attempt to look elsewhere and see differently. The weather brought the news home to the speaker, who invokes peace as a desperate plea in response.

To distill a difference between the antebellum aesthetics of Emerson and the “bellum” aesthetics of Allen, we might say that the work of a creative imagination transforming the world has been replaced by the grimmer task of picking up the pieces and trying to construct something out of what seems like nothing. Emily Dickinson’s Poem #291B both validates and develops this distinction, echoing many of the images discussed thus far.

It sifts from Leaden Sieves –

It powders all the Field –

It fills with Alabaster Wool

The Wrinkles of the Road –

It makes an even face

Of Mountain – and of Plain –

Unbroken Forehead from the East

Unto the East – again –

It reaches to the Fence –

It wraps it, Rail by Rail,

Till it is lost in Fleeces –

It flings a Crystal Vail

On Stump – and Stack – and Stem –

The Summer’s empty Room –

Acres of Joints, where Harvests were –

Recordless – but for them –

It Ruffles Wrists of Posts –

As Ancles of a Queen

Then stills it’s Artisans – like Swans

Denying they have been –²⁶

Rather than remaking the world in a fantastic jumble (Emerson), or burying it in a winding sheet (Allen), Dickinson’s “It”—at first the snow, then something more mysterious—gives the world a sinister facelift, covering up signs of devastation. Like a cosmetician, it “powders all the Wood” and “fills with Alabaster Wool / The Wrinkles of the Road.” Fixing up the landscape might not seem so bad, until we hear that “It makes an Even Face” and an “Unbroken Forehead” of the entire world, “from the East, / Unto the East, again.” That leaves us to wonder, if the globe is a head, where the rest of the body is. It also suggests that a face is made up for posthumous viewing. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust discusses the advances in embalming during the Civil War. Families who could afford it hired embalmers near the front to prepare bodies for shipment home—often a long way by train for Union soldiers—so that loved ones could be seen one last time and given a proper burial.²⁷ Embalmers and other middlemen in this process quickly realized that there was money to be made identifying and preserving the dead for distant burial. Dickinson’s image of filling wrinkles with wool on a bodiless face begins to suggest the detached, clinical gaze that would accompany such engagements with the Civil War dead.

Dickinson’s “even face” updates the “universal face[s]” of both Thomson and Cowper. Thomson’s snowy visage shows nature’s indifference to human suffering:

Earth’s universal face, deep hid, and chill,

Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide

The works of man.

In Thomson’s poem, winter is a murderer, but the focus is on individual casualties, like that of the “swain” who “sinks / Beneath the shelter of a shapeless drift” while his family waits for him to come home. Dickinson’s snow buries countless bodies—a world of bodies—beneath a shapeless drift of global proportions. She emphasizes the enormity of the burial by nodding to and magnifying Thomson’s depiction; a snowstorm that can “make [ ] an even face / Of Mountain – and of Plain –” leveling peaks and valleys, would have precipitation levels of hundreds or thousands of feet. Snow would have to be that deep, Dickinson implies, to cover the massive number of casualties. The unimaginable proportions death takes in modern warfare summons a hallucinatory depiction. Dickinson has given up on crafting an appropriate affective response; in the “even face” response has been overwhelmed, the onlooker numbed in a mimic facsimile of the distant masses of dead soldiers she cannot summon to the mind’s eye. Death has become so remote and so vast that registering and absorbing the fact of it is inconceivable; the poem asks us simply to think about the blankness of shock that would accompany such an encounter. Dickinson’s “even face” exaggerates the transformation “by most unfelt” of “the face of universal nature” that in Cowper signified a kind of numbness.²⁸ She elevates that numbness to shock.

The poem foregrounds the fragmentation not only of poetic understanding and worldview, as Allen’s “Snow” does, but also of the human body. “It sifts” through images of body parts, vainly trying to reassemble the human, an aesthetic task, Dickinson indicates, that inevitably accompanies modern warfare. Countless Civil War reports of battlefields (Dickinson replaces the first version’s “Wood” with “Field” in this second version, strengthening the military association) covered with wounded and dead soldiers used metaphors of autumn harvest (discussed in Chapter 2), underscoring the gruesome yield of war. Dickinson also aligns the botanical world with human anatomy; “stump” can refer to both botanical and human portions (the hospital where Silas Weir Mitchell worked was known as the “Stump Hospital”). Once that association is established, we can read “Stem” as shorthand for human decapitation, and “stack” for human corpses piled like so much hay. The next phrase, “Acres of Joints,” fully inverts the metaphoric valence, so that now human dismemberment signifies agricultural harvest; we do not commonly refer to mowed fields as full of “Joints.” If “Acres of Joints” are “where Harvests were,” then we can understand that, rather than metaphoric equivalence, Dickinson has moved to a literal description of substitution: where grain was harvested now lie human bodies and their dismembered parts. Simultaneously closing and opening the distance between Southern battlefields and Northern home fronts, the snow of winter covers the summer’s field, where the remains of harvest evoke amputation.

Out of supposedly “recordless” carnage, a new body of poetry arises, albeit in parts, parts that recall those just-buried pieces. The harvest of the dead may be “recordless” (Faust notes that many bodies were buried without record during the war), or their records may be resurrected in altered and denied form.²⁹ As if covering wounds that have no possibility of healing, “it flings a Crystal Vail,” doling out forgetfulness or numbness to the condition. Buried in the snow of amnesia, the stumps, stacks, stems, and joints are left to memorialize themselves. Yet the poem does register the ramifications of remote violence in its shattered language and logic. The ruffling of the posts’ wrists suggests that the speaker has difficulty distinguishing body parts from other things, so that her simile is oddly doubled and broken: ruffling the posts’ wrists is like ruffling the Queen’s “Ancles.” Corporeal disaggregation haunts the poem, disrupts a more conventional form of troping, and records the ramifications of the recordless dead that the poem on the face of it—the artificially composed face—denies.

While Dickinson makes plain her poetic debt to Emerson, Cowper, Thomson, and perhaps Allen, she also reaches back to Greek literary associations of winter and war. The variant for “Artisans” is “Myrmidons,” the warlike people that Achilles led to battle against Troy. This single word summons the story of the Trojan War, as depicted in Homer’s Iliad, in the language of Alexander Pope’s translation (that translation was in her family library, as were volumes by Thomson and Cowper).³⁰ An extended passage in the Iliad compares in detail a warlike snowstorm with the Greeks’ blizzard-like bombardment of Troy with stones:

And now the Stones descend in heavier Show’rs.

As when high Jove his sharp Artill’ry forms,

And opes his cloudy Magazine of Storms.³¹

This excerpt suggests that Dickinson’s poem is infused with the metaphoric logic of the Iliad: the heaviness and minerality, for lack of a better word, of her snow metaphors—lead, alabaster—summon the storm of rocks in the epic. Her sifting and powdering “It” suggests Jove’s godly impersonality; both deliver lethal, aerial messages to humans without concern for the consequences, but Dickinson’s “It” is so far removed that it doesn’t have a name or a place in a belief system as Jove does. Even so, in one way “It” is more intimate, for it is engaged in domestic activities that are suitable for a war at home. The poems also share “fleeces” as an evocation of snow:

The circling seas, alone absorbing all,

Drink the dissolving fleeces as they fall:

So from each side increased the stony rain,

And the white ruin rises o’er the plain.

Dickinson’s synonym for fleeces, “alabaster wool,” further underscores the connection: Alabaster is a word derived from Greek for a fine white stone from which ornamental vessels and sculptures were carved.³² Dickinson inverts the earlier metaphoric valence: if in the Iliad, battle is described as a snowstorm, in Dickinson’s poem, a snowstorm is described as a battle … or is it? By the end of the poem, “It” is also “lost in fleeces,” and it is unclear which is the tenor and which is the vehicle. Dickinson underscores the remoteness of present violence by referring to even more elusive and remote past violence, historical, but also mythical and beautiful, inspiration for an enduring poetic tradition that, she suggests, must both resonate and be renovated in order to make sense of the present violence.

Though many critics and historians have found nature poetry of the period to work in the service of naturalizing and rationalizing state-sanctioned violence, both Dickinson and Allen offer a thoughtful meditation on mass violence via the language of natural phenomena. They forge connections between remote scenes of suffering, largely in the South, and the Union home front.³³ The weather is not only a metaphor for war; it is also a metaphor for news. The “simple news that nature told,” as Faith Barrett has suggested, is not that simple once the war begins, and not just for Dickinson.³⁴

“The Snow of Southern Summers”

Though Confederate and Union poetry are usually characterized as discrete, opposed wartime forms of expression that do not enter into communication with one another, Confederate Henry Timrod’s poems are clearly engaged with a tradition of English and New England snow poems as a way of infusing climactic differences between North and South with contrasting symbolic valences. “Ethnogenesis” inaugurated the birth of a new nation on the occasion of “the meeting of the Southern Congress, at Montgomery, February, 1861,” as the extended title tells us.³⁵ Published in the Charleston Daily Courier on February 23, 1861, it was reprinted not only in Southern papers, but also in Littell’s Living Age, a weekly Boston publication.³⁶ Timrod’s nature poetry had been popular enough in the North before the war that he published a volume of poems in the prestigious Ticknor and Fields series in 1860.³⁷ Northern readers of “Ethnogenesis,” curious how secession changed the poet’s outlook, would see that Timrod is quite familiar with poetic traditions that associate winter with war even if, as a lifelong resident of South Carolina, he did not have the substantial experience with blizzards that residents of Massachusetts could claim. Working both within and against that tradition, Timrod broadcasts a new kind of snow that he promotes as superior to the northern sort. This kinder, gentler snow, along with the rest of a more amenable, milder climate, will help the South win the war:

Beneath so kind a sky—the very sun

Takes part with us; and on our errands run

All breezes of the ocean; dew and rain

Do noiseless battle for us; and the Year,

And all the gentle daughters in her train,

March in our ranks, and in our service wield

Long spears of golden grain!

A yellow blossom as her fairy shield,

June flings her azure banner to the wind,

While in the order of their birth

Her sisters pass, and many an ample field

Grows white beneath their steps, till now, behold,

Its endless sheets unfold

THE SNOW OF SOUTHERN SUMMERS! Let the earth

Rejoice! beneath those fleeces soft and warm

Our happy land shall sleep

In a repose as deep

As if we lay intrenched behind

Whole leagues of Russian ice and Arctic storm!³⁸

Rather than, like the winter snow, competing against those living in its atmosphere—alienating, isolating, and confusing the human population—Timrod’s summer weather “takes part with us.” Personification is far less ambiguous and more persistent in “Ethnogenesis” than in the poems of Emerson, Allen, and Dickinson: the sky, the sun, the breezes, the year, the months (“all the gentle daughters”), all take human shapes so they can take up arms—fanciful arms—a “fairy shield,” a “spear” of grain—in the name of cotton.³⁹ Cotton, the thing not named, and one of the few things not personified in the passage, behaves atmospherically, like southern snow, rather than like a plant. It blankets the earth in “fleeces,” like Dickinson’s and the Iliad’s snow, only hospitably, nurturing the earth and keeping it warm. Its whiteness becomes the very atmosphere of moral purity that Timrod hopes will inspire the new Southern nation. At the same time, he associates the color of cotton with racial superiority. Timrod thus posits an alternative to northern snow that appeals to the slaveholding South; this snow is far more ideologically saturated, and unlike the Northern poems, it is directly tied to nation building.

There is one strange ambivalence about the Confederate project worth noting, however. The cotton stretches out in “sheets” like clouds, or like Allen’s “winding sheets,” but rather than wrapping the dead, it cultivates an opiate “sleep” that Timrod casts positively. He suggests that cotton inures white Southern populations from Northern criticism as effectively as Russian ice and Arctic storm would deter travel; yet to “lay intrenched” conflicts defensively with the “deep” “repose” of a sleeping “happy land,” suggesting that the white Southern conscience that Timrod constructs and bolsters here might require anesthesia in order for its dream of perfect whiteness to operate properly. “Ethnogenesis” self-consciously works within a Northern tradition in order to oppose it, but in responding to Northern criticisms of Southern slavocracy, Timrod’s poem betrays influences of the positions he opposes.

Timrod clearly hopes his readership will extend beyond his region and sway foreign readers to a Confederate viewpoint of the conflict. While Dickinson’s “even face” stretches grimly around the world from “east to east,” Timrod imagines that markets for cotton, like the Gulf Stream, will transport the warmth of Southern hospitality far and wide, convincing the world that there is a kinder, gentler alternative to the capitalism of the North:

The hour perchance is not yet wholly ripe

When all shall own it, but the type

Whereby we shall be known in every land

Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand,

And through the cold, untempered ocean pours

Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores

May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze

Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas!⁴⁰

The Gulf Stream travels from Florida north along the East Coast of the United States to Newfoundland before crossing the Atlantic to warm the western shore of Europe (Timrod is significantly silent about the southern branch of the stream, which circulates off the coast of West Africa). Ocean currents, like news, weather, and desirable commodities, circulate widely; Timrod’s snowy cotton evokes all these currents in its appeal for global acceptance for the new nation, which he promises will be superior to the former United States and its remnant, the Northern states.

A companion piece to “Ethnogenesis,” “The Cotton Boll” (published in the Charleston Mercury on September 3, 1861) underscores the inevitability that Southern cotton trump Northern snow. Its infinitude rivals its competitor’s only as blessed land rivals a wasteland:

To the remotest point of sight,

Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,

The endless field is white;

And the whole landscape glows,

For many a shining league away,

With such accumulated light

As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!⁴¹

The “waste of snow” is countered by an “endless” white field that glows with holy light. Timrod could not be more adamant about the righteousness of the Southern cause, which he articulates by turning an inherited tradition of winter war poetry back against itself. In order to accomplish this rhetorical feat, however, he must turn cotton into weather, vaporize its materiality so that it may become a medium of illumination, a means of communication, rather than a substance imbricated in material forms of exploitative labor.

In “The Cotton Boll,” even more than in “Ethnogenesis,” Timrod registers awareness of his evaporation of materiality that renders his poetic logic suspect. The poem begins by drawing attention to the very figure he almost erases: the slave.

While I recline

At ease beneath

This immemorial pine,

Small sphere!

(By dusky fingers brought this morning here

And shown with boastful smiles),⁴²

The poem presents a rhetorical problem from the outset: the white speaker’s “ease” depends upon the labor of the “dusky” other. The cotton he casts as a pure, ethereal symbol—of global interconnectedness (“small sphere!”), of white superiority, of mystical climatic harmony—only underscores the presence of a slave system that removes the speaker from the very thing he claims fully to possess. If leisured white superiority and black servitude were so natural, the slave would either be more fully present—an entire body rather than fingers and smiles—or totally absent, as he is in “Ethnogenesis,” where the sister “months” plant, cultivate, and grow the cotton without visible help or effort. Here the slave leans into the frame of the poem, partially materialized and partially dematerialized. In a poem where white signifies holy illumination, it is not surprising that the slave is the absence of light, but he is not fully turned to night; his “dusky fingers” and “boastful smiles” linger, as a reminder that the dream of the South hinges on a mythology of “the little boll,” “a spell” like that “in the ocean shell.”⁴³ Timrod draws attention to the fantastic element of his reverie even as he seeks to naturalize it, suggesting that the material conditions of slavery are more present and contrary to the vision than he or his readers might longingly wish. The “dusky fingers” hold and support the small, white globe, after all, in much the same way as a divine creator secures the earth. In choosing cotton as his ideal mode of disseminating the good news of the South, Timrod acknowledges that his “trembling line[s]” form a “tangled skein” that he fails to unravel.⁴⁴

By 1863, snowy cotton has disappeared from Timrod’s poetry. “Spring,” published in the Southern Illustrated News on April 4, tries to celebrate the beauty of the South in springtime, but, as in the Northern poetry of this time, thoughts of the dead and the wounded seep into the images, until the war finally takes over the poem. As in Allen’s “Snow,” the process is gradual; it seems unconscious or accidental at first, and then gains momentum. At the outset, only “pathos” indicates the darker, advancing vision:

Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air

Which dwells with all things fair,

Spring, with her golden suns and silver rain,

Is with us once again.⁴⁵

Soon, blood appears, at first only as part of a playful personification—“In the deep heart of every forest tree / The blood is all aglee.”⁴⁶ The tree’s blood rises to the surface in a “flush” it shares with the sky: “the maple reddens on the lawn, / Flushed by the season’s dawn.” The seeds working their way toward the sun, figures of rebirth, unsettlingly recall the myriad war dead:

As yet the turf is dark, although you know

That, not a span below,

A thousand germs are groping through the gloom,

And soon will burst their tomb.

The thousand groping germs are suggestive of future flowers, but also of dead men, who strive uncertainly for resurrection—to “burst their tomb.” Just before facing the submerged topic of violence directly, the viewer sees a flood of purple in anticipation of the imminent profusion of blossoms:

Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn

In the sweet airs of morn;

One almost looks to see the very street

Grow purple at his feet.

Drawing attention to the sense of unbirth summons the possibility of abortion. The purple pool on the street extends that line of thought: though the speaker may be anticipating the blossoming of hyacinths or violets, the figure of the undifferentiated, spreading mass is just as readily associated with blood.

The undertones of morbidity are confirmed retroactively when the poem turns directly to the topic of “war and crime” and “the call of Death” in “the west-wind’s aromatic breath.”⁴⁷ Unthinkably, Spring may awaken the sap in trees and the song of birds, but she will also “rouse, for all her tranquil charms, / A million men to arms.” Then, the fields will run with real blood rather than the flushed hues of dawn, the purple flowers, and the dark red of just-unfolded maple leaves. Metaphors will become material truths:

There shall be deeper hues upon her plains

Than all her sunlit rains,

And every gladdening influence around,

Can summon from the ground.

Oh! standing on this desecrated mould,

Methinks that I behold,

Lifting her bloody daisies up to God,

Spring kneeling on the sod,

And calling, with the voice of all her rills,

Upon the ancient hills

To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves

Who turn her meads to graves.

Spattered with actual blood, the daisies carry spring’s plea for relief and a return to the pastoral ideal they used to inhabit; the personifications of nature that so blithely populated Timrod’s earlier poems that celebrated the new Confederacy pray for an end to slaughter.

Only in the final stanza does Timrod address the politics of the conflict, and he does so in a cryptic way that suggests, as in “The Cotton Boll,” doubts about the Southern cause. Spring calls for the landscape to “crush the tyrants and the slaves,” but leaves the reader to determine their identity. The slippage leaves the phrase open to overlapping interpretations. Conventionally the Civil War–era rhetoric of the South depicts Northerners as tyrants and white Southerners as slaves; a Georgia secessionist, for example, proclaimed “we are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it.”⁴⁸ If Timrod is deploying that conventional rhetoric, then he is suggesting that the Northern “tyrants” and the white Southerners they “enslave” are equally responsible for turning the earth into a repository of death, destroying the animating cycle of life. If Timrod means to suggest that Northerners, along with actual Southern slaves, are responsible for the carnage, he has mixed that conventional metaphoric use of “slave” with its literal meaning. In that case, he is explicitly admitting the fact of slavery in his tribute to Southern purity when he very clearly avoided the topic in “Ethnogenesis” and “The Cotton Boll” because it disrupted the pastoral ideal of the peaceful and effortlessly bountiful South. And if the slaves are literal slaves, then the fact that their graves are overwhelming Spring’s meads and staining the daisies suggests that white Southerners, again, have blood on their hands. Death and injustice have infiltrated Timrod’s vision of Southern righteousness. He cannot make the South as pure as the driven snow, or as the cultivated cotton. He doesn’t need to explicitly acknowledge the failure on that score for it to be evident in the logic of the poem.

The beginning of a complex pattern emerges that offers insight into the aesthetics and ethics of violence in U.S. Civil War poetry, North and South. When confronted with the fact of violent, divisive conflict, Allen, Dickinson, and Timrod all look to the sky for explanation. Early in the war, Timrod, like Emerson before him, asserts the transformative power of the imagination; Emerson’s night wind and Timrod’s seasons both create a fleecy substance that covers the existing world and remakes it into an idealized wonderland. For Emerson, writing more than two decades before the war, that wonderland is created by a force described in militaristic terms that are clearly whimsical; Timrod, in 1861, also whimsically, enlists nature to fight for the Confederacy. Emerson aestheticizes the weather in order to give shape to an abstract idea, while Timrod summons aesthetic power to vaporize commodities—cotton and slaves—and turn them into ethereal symbols. Cotton becomes a mode of communication analogous to the North’s mass media networks; Timrod imagines cotton traveling far and wide, like tropical winds, touching people in foreign lands and converting them to the Southern cause. In 1861, Timrod in South Carolina, surrounded by the unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, violence of slavery, which he seeks to justify without mentioning, turns slave labor into twilight in order to make present violence remote. He fails; dusky fingers and boastful smiles, however idealized, return us to the material subjects he begins to erase. Dickinson and Allen, at a distance from the war, conversely draw upon the weather to materialize the news of the battlefront at home; winter’s freezing temperatures and frozen precipitation brings the war home, in all its remoteness. By 1863, Timrod comes closer to their understanding of the ethical relation between materiality and metaphor. All three wartime poets, as distinguished from Emerson’s earlier practice, show the ways that events shape perception as much as perception shapes events. Involuntarily, perhaps, the Civil War poets must leave themselves open to the elements—including an elemental media environment—and whatever they carry with them through the air. The next section shows Melville working within this tradition, but binding it tightly to the historical details of weather in wartime and its devastating impact on physical bodies; his insistence on explicitly articulating the physical ground for the proliferation of figural practices allows us to explore the media underpinnings of this circulation of literary meditations on wartime violence.

“The storms behind the storms we feel” in “Donelson”

Melville locates his 1866 collection Battle-Pieces, or Aspects of the War, and particularly “Donelson,” within this tradition of contemplating the question of remote suffering via figures of the weather (indeed, he prepared to write his first book of poems by reading Thomson’s poems, among others).⁴⁹ Melville identifies the abstraction of violence into figures of weather as a problem as well as a necessity for thinking about war at a distance; the abstraction is an inevitable result of the mediated immediacy of the Civil War’s reception. The difficulty of apprehending mass suffering that both Thomson and Cowper identify is made newly specific and urgent in Melville’s poem, for the masses are Confederate and Union soldiers, killing each other at a distance from the Northern home front, but, at least for Unionists, within the boundaries of the same nation. Near and far are therefore juxtaposed with extreme compression that, in turn, pressures the poet to generate “strange analogies” and new “combinations” in response.

Melville stages this scenario in all its complexity in “Donelson.” The poem juxtaposes reportage of the Tennessee battle on the banks of the Cumberland River, which took place in stormy weather February 11–16, 1862, with reception of the news via telegraph, also in stormy weather, at a city bulletin board in the North. Day after day, people surround the board, eagerly awaiting each additional posting, responding changefully and fitfully as the story unfolds. Rather than stressing the miraculous quality of the rapid transmission of the news, as do many of his contemporaries, Melville makes the highly mediated and imperfect transmission of information the subject of the poem. He foregrounds the impressionism of the reporter, the remarks of an editor, the weather’s disruptions of telegraphic transmission, errors in the reportage, the further intermediary steps of the man who posts the bulletins, and of another man who reads them to the crowd. He emphasizes his own layers of poetic mediation as well. Doubling the figure of the journalist reporting on the battle, the poet is “our own reporter,” who “a dispatch compiles, /As best he may, from varied sources.”⁵⁰ Melville presents his poem as a theatrical staging or script, in which different tenses and fonts are used for those on the home front reading and listening to the news and those who compose and disseminate the news.⁵¹

Melville meticulously follows the reportage of the event, as if it were crucial in accessing whatever comprehension of the war might be possible. Indeed, “Donelson” is partially constituted of newspaper reports; it is not simply a poetic rendition of them. In writing the poem, Melville pored over newspapers; as Frank Day has demonstrated, “Donelson” is saturated in quotations and paraphrases from the coverage more than any other poem in the collection, many of which foreground their intensive debt to journalistic sources.⁵² Those sources, in turn, are steeped in linguistic conventions derived from a romantic poetic tradition, so that it is impossible to stipulate where the poem leaves off and its newspaper sources begin: paraphrasing blurs the difference. In offering this hybrid form, Melville presents his reader with a range of entangled questions: What is the difference, if any, in the information derived from newspaper reportage and poetry? How can poems make us feel the news, and vice versa? What is the relation between media and genre? These questions cloud and complicate the relation among suffering, its representations, and their reception. This endless complication is the subject of inquiry, and the weather is Melville’s mode. Melville takes the battle’s circumstances—a cold snap in Tennessee kills primarily Northern soldiers supposedly more accustomed to cold weather—as an occasion to meditate on the rhetorical and psychological functions of weather in wartime in their unsettled and unsettling configurations. The poem ricochets back and forth between the home front and the war front, mimicking media circuitry, and I will follow the form in my analysis of the deliberately overwhelming complexity of the poem.

Melville follows the minutely detailed temporal unfolding of ongoing, unsynthesized reports on the ground to convey a sense of the radical shifts in subjectivity that accompany unpredictable shifts of both weather and war. Strange analogies are formed between Melville’s crowd around the bulletin board and the soldiers on the distant battlefield, and it is up to the poem’s reader to discern their significance. Meteorological thinking is ubiquitous in the poem—it is its atmosphere—and it works in every which way. At first, there is a difference between the weather on the home front and the battle-front. A crowd gathers around the board even though they are “pelted by sleet in the icy street”; they go home at night, frustrated that the story is unfinished, and return again in the daytime.⁵³

The listeners hear news of balmy weather in the South—recited by a “tall” man, who reads the reports aloud—and the troops, as well as the reporter, are in high spirits. Melville’s lyrical reporter of events seems inappropriately stuck in romantic modes of describing the weather:

The welcome weather

Is clear and mild; ’tis much like May.

The ancient boughs that lace together

Along the stream, and hang far forth,

Strange with green mistletoe, betray

A dreamy contrast to the North.⁵⁴

The reporter could be setting the stage for an encounter between lovers, rather than armies; the “dreamy contrast” suggests that Southern weather seduces the Northern soldiers, who perceive a beautiful, possibly deceptive, wonderland. While the passage is in the Wordsworthian tradition of nature poetry, it nevertheless also enhances the New York Times’ own enamored report of Tennessee’s weather: “The scene here was magnificent beyond description—the night was as warm as an evening in August, in our more northern latitudes, a full moon looked down from an unclouded sky, and glanced off the bayonets, plumes, and sword-hilts without number.”⁵⁵ The soldiers glittering in the moonlight offer a romantic vision of military engagement that later reportage on the conflict will make a mockery of. The deeply harmonious relation between the poem and the Times report suggests that Melville’s poem resonates with the news rather than, or in addition to, simply critiquing it, as some readers have suggested.⁵⁶ Perhaps because of its inconsequentiality, this first report, transmitted on Wednesday the twelfth in the poem’s meticulous timeline, has no readers on the home front; the bad weather is enough to discourage reading so that the bulletin was simply “Washed by the storm till the paper grew / Every shade of streaky blue.”⁵⁷

Melville suggests not simply that the reporter is unreliable, but that it would be impossible to generate a truthful and coherent account of such rapidly shifting conditions and events; the analogies the poem draws between Union troops and shifting weather cannot be stabilized into a patriotic narrative of destined victory. As the poem unfolds alongside the battle, the conditions shift radically, as does the reporter’s viewpoint. On Thursday the weather turned severely cold, making the skirmishes in the woods around the fort physically painful as well as deadly. The reporter blends the fighting men with the weather: “we stormed them on their left / A chilly change in the afternoon.”⁵⁸ The “chilly change” is a drop in temperature, but it is also a turn for the worse in the soldiers’ circumstances. “ The cold incites / To swinging of arms with brisk rebound.” Melville makes no distinction between human limbs and their military extensions; the need for warmth causes men to move their “arms,” which in turn causes them to fight more fiercely. Men’s actions are fueled by their natural surroundings, no longer through a romantic reverie, but in a metonymic fusion of deadly forces. Imagining, as Whitman does, that the weather sympathizes with human events, the reporter persistently suggests that the weather is on the Union’s side: he tells us “The sky is dun /Fordooming the fall of Donelson,” and urges the Union soldiers to victory. The Times report that was one of Melville’s primary sources for “Donelson” is equally saturated with this logic: “Thursday morning dawned beautifully, and seemed to smile upon the efforts of the national troops. The men cheerfully accepted the omen.”⁵⁹ The poem’s reporter further states that the people of Tennessee have never seen such cold weather and believe the Northern soldiers brought it: “ Yea the earnest North /Has elementally issued forth / To storm this Donelson.” This insistence on the weather’s Union sympathies is particularly incongruous in this case, however, because in fact, the weather turned vicious, and the Northerners suffered severely from it. Experiencing a balmy day on the march to Donelson, the Union soldiers discarded their coats and blankets. Two days later, many of them froze to death in the sleet and snow, dying of exposure.⁶⁰ The reader of “Donelson” might note at this point that the reporter’s initial report must then be incorrect—residents of Tennessee understand that the weather can change suddenly from balmy to cold, so they weren’t imagining it as an accompaniment to righteous Northern wrath, and it is the Northerners who project an ill-fitting tropical ideal onto the region, at great cost. But the correspondent doesn’t revise, or even seemingly remember, his own previous figuration. It is left to the “listeners” at the bulletin board within the poem and the readers of the poem to note, or to overlook, the dramatic irony.

The reporter’s meticulous, elaborately crafted description of the first day of battle is wasted on the people reading and listening to those reports. When Melville shifts to the reception on the home front, we see that, jarringly, no one notes the suffering of the soldiers. They use the occasion not to think about what has happened at Donelson, but to express their simplistic, overly general opinions about the fight. The first man to speak is merely irritated at the tedious length of the conflict: “‘Twill drag along—drag along,’ / Growled a cross patriot.”⁶¹ Another offers a cheer for Grant that “urchins” and some adults mindlessly repeat. A “Copperhead” reminds the crowd that the Confederates are giving the Union a good fight.⁶² The disconnection between home front and war front is complete; the civilians use the report as an occasion to editorialize without a thought to the suffering of those who are fighting the war.

As Friday’s report grows more gruesome it is clear that the reporter himself is at a loss, having shifted rhetorical modes rapidly in ways that don’t properly accommodate the suffering he is trying to convey. The prospects seem dimmer for the Union; the weather turns worse, so that “hapless wounded men were frozen.” Again the reporter finds an inappropriately romantic simile—“Our heedless boys / Were nipped like blossoms”—but this is not because he is callous. As if unsure of how to convey such an event—the boys dying not only by bullets but also by frost—just a few lines later he offers a completely different metaphor that conflicts with the first: the Union soldiers are now “ice-glazed corpses, each a stone / A sacrifice to Donelson.”⁶³ Now he has turned to the language of patriotic sacrifice to recuperate the losses, but the odd juxtaposition of the two unrelated registers of diction suggest that he doesn’t know how to give meaning to the happenstance of Northern soldiers freezing to death during a battle in Tennessee.⁶⁴

Timothy Sweet has suggested that in deploying these verbal clichés Melville critiques the ways patriotic rhetoric dehumanizes soldiers and defaces their suffering. He argues that the poem exposes how wartime poetic discourse and journalistic reportage “aestheticize the war,” thus contributing to the ideological work of converting casualties into symbols of patriotic sacrifice: “ideological discourse displaces the body” “once the body has served its purpose in war.”⁶⁵ This claim overlooks both the struggle to find adequate language on the part of the reporter as well as Melville’s own immersion in the heterogeneous rhetorical conventions he “compiles.” The reporter is searching for ways, however ineptly, to convey, rather than erase, the plight of the Northern soldiers. His observations exceed the pro-Union narrative he places upon them: this complicates Sweet’s thesis of an ironclad, inescapable ideology. Rather, projecting simplified, sense-making narratives on chaotic events is a tendency that no one in the poem is immune to, even though those stories coexist with all kinds of information that refutes them. The poem’s journalist reports that the soldiers who witness their comrades freezing tell themselves “it is a sacrifice to Donelson”: “They swear it, and swerve not, gazing on / A flag, deemed black, flying from Donelson.”⁶⁶ Thinking about the slaughter in this way, Melville suggests, is a survival strategy, and the soldiers themselves may well know that if they don’t keep swearing to themselves, they could give up and freeze even sooner. Their awareness of the pragmatic quality of their belief is suggested by the word “deem,” as if they know that imagining the enemy as an evil empire with a black flag will help them survive. Their practical self-deceit is further underscored by the immediately subsequent observation that the Confederate soldiers do what they can to help their freezing foes even though they too are “in shivering plight”:

Some of the wounded in the wood

Were cared for by the foe last night,

Though he could do them little needed good,

Himself being all in shivering plight.⁶⁷

The Times notes this interlude as well, which is completely inconsistent with the reporter’s tendency to elevate the Union soldiers at the expense of the Confederate soldiers.

Observation, it seems, exceeds the ideological power to contain it, but ideology is useful and necessary, not only for political reasons. The reporter’s romantically saturated simile—“our heedless boys / Were nipped like blossoms”—as well as his language of monumental sacrifice—“each one a stone / A sacrifice for Donelson”—are poignantly inadequate as well as ideologically motivated. Attempts at rationalizing the carnage in terms of the natural cruelty of frost, or of a higher moral power, reveal themselves to be fragile attempts at holding onto meaning in a circumstance that threatens to annihilate it. Romantic similes and patriotic rhetoric can’t account for the Northerners freezing to death in Tennessee, but nothing arrives to take its place. Melville thus foregrounds an urgent need for what Whitman calls “strange analogies” and “different combinations” and suggests in the process that all this talk about the weather might be an attempt to forge relations and correspondences that take the place of romantic modes of troping, which at that point are functioning as little more than dead metaphors that further dehumanize the soldiers rather than bring their suffering closer to home.

Before the Northern listeners can feel something for distant strangers, they must feel for abstract representations in new media forms. The catastrophic situation as well as the sheer length of the battle finally allows the people on the home front to think about the plight of the Union soldiers. The fact that the Union experiences setbacks and momentarily appears to be losing allows room for meditation rather than formulaic expressions of patriotic support. Donelson was a river battle as well as a land battle; Union ironclads shelled the fort from the Cumberland River while land soldiers tried to breech the walls (fig. 6). The fervent belief in the inviolability of the ironclads led to premature reports of victory. But that report is quickly reversed as news arrives that one of the ships was actually disabled by Confederate fire. This setback, on top of the descriptions of the soldiers’ severe suffering, causes the listeners on the home front to meditate on the situation. They may not achieve total fusion with the suffering soldiers, but they do begin to think about how little they know. The listening throng turns inward, to “silent thought.” This brooding in the brooding storm—“whose black flag showed in heaven” over their heads, corresponds inscrutably with the flag deemed black at Donelson:

Many an earnest heart was won,

As broodingly he plodded on,

To find in himself some bitter thing,

Some hardness in his lot as harrowing

As Donelson.⁶⁸

Rather than expressing their own feelings about the war, the brooders try to make correspondences between private and public campaigns, finding in themselves something as bitter as the soldiers are experiencing. In this they are forging new kinds of relations, infusing technological innovation with human desires for connection with others:

Flitting faces took the hue

Of that washed bulletin board in view,

And seemed to bear the public grief

As private, and uncertain of relief.

Their faces “every shade of streaky blue” the color of ink washed away by rain, the listeners have to feel with and through a sheet that has been transcribed from a telegraphic report that was submitted by an onlooker (or someone who poses as such; no one can be sure) far away in Tennessee. This isn’t easy. It requires different combinations, as Whitman said, “strange analogies,” new modes of verbal relation. For, Melville suggests, in order to find relation, we reach out beyond our bodies into our surroundings, and we relate to what we find.

As soon as news of Northern victory arrives, the quest for understanding ends and is immediately forgotten. The uneven process Melville has arduously charted becomes abstracted into lines that resemble a drinking toast, which summons no pain or cost:

Figure 6. “Storming of Fort Donelson—decisive bayonet charge of the Iowa Second Regiment on the Rebel entrenchments at Fort Donelson, Saturday evening, February 15, resulting in the capture of the works on the following morning—From a Sketch by our Special Artist, H. Lovie,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 15, 1862, 264–265. The snow reported in the journalistic coverage is not visible in the sketch—the men themselves are the “storm.” Courtesy of HarpWeek.

……all is right: the fight is won,

The winter-fight for Donelson.

Hurrah!⁶⁹

Victory dispels all musings and broodings; “eyes grew wet” but only with “happy triumph.” The erasure of the event is sealed with the drunken reverie that ensues and the warm houselights that block out the weather:

O, to the punches brewed that night

Went little water. Windows bright

Beamed rosy on the sleet without.

The last residues of the crowd’s memory are lodged in those with a personal loss, who, forgotten by the revelers, retain some knowledge at a painful cost. The poem’s final scene is of the dissolution of boundaries between person and environment required for partial understanding:

But others who were wakeful laid

In midnight beds, and early rose, And, feverish in the foggy snows

Snatched the damp paper—wife and maid

The death-list like a river flows

Down the pale sheet

And there the whelming waters meet.

Tears, the rain, and the names of the dead dissolve into a single body of water that summons the specter of the Cumberland River, which still flows by the gutted Fort Donelson. What remains is a new figure, one that signifies the challenges to come in representing mass suffering in an age of mass media: the blank sheet of paper, like a bluish gray sky, like an expressionless face. Melville has returned us to Cowper’s earlier figure of the frozen, snowy universal face, transposed now onto the telegraphic bulletin.

Critics have divided in their interpretations of the elaborate staging of Civil War news in “Donelson.” Hennig Cohen and Stanton Garner emphasize the pains Melville took to forge correspondences between soldiers and civilians, especially via the weather: while the Union soldiers freeze to death in an unanticipated cold snap and storm, the listeners also endure “rain and sleet,” which “takes them in spirit to the weather and the storm of battle that the soldiers at Donelson experience.” Cohen goes so far as to say that this results in a “total fusion” between the listeners and the soldiers, perfect solidarity in “universal suffering.”⁷⁰ On the other hand, Franny Nudelman and Faith Barrett stress the shortcomings and failures of these correspondences, arguing that Melville posits these relations only to expose their inadequacy. For Nudelman, “Melville emphasizes the unreliability of communication, and, by extension, the unbridgeable distance between battle and home fronts.” For Barrett, Melville shows that “poetry and journalism equally fail at the task of representing the horrors of war.”⁷¹

Melville indeed meticulously forges correspondences between home front and war front via figures of weather and the news, and he shows these correspondences to be faulty, insufficient, partial, ideologically saturated, and even delusional. Like the soldiers, the listeners may be rain soaked and shivering while waiting for the latest bulletins to be posted, as Cohen and Garner point out, but that does not so easily indicate “their essential similarity of situation” and the “universal prevalence of suffering.” The listeners have coats, and one even has an umbrella that Melville rather extravagantly likens to “an ambulance-cover / Riddled with bullet-holes, spattered all over.”⁷² The simile shows the distance and difference more than the sameness of the listeners’ experiences; the hail that damaged the umbrella may be related to, but is only a soft echo of, the bullet-perforated, mud-spattered ambulance. He and the other listeners can and do go home each night of the three-day battle, returning in the morning; many of the soldiers contract frostbite and die of exposure while they sleep.

Melville stages this difference, but he does not wholly condemn it; he himself is immersed in it, and it is this unavoidable immersion that he most strongly indicates. It is a circumstance to be confronted, not overcome. The gap, both produced and made visible by the journalistic reportage intermixed with Melville’s poem, can be measured and perhaps diminished as a result. Melville, like Thomson and Cowper before him, takes as a starting point that apprehending remote suffering is a difficult if not impossible task. Milette Shamir notes that in “Donelson” particularly, Melville performs “a dynamic back and forth investigation of the civilian author, whose distance allows a broad vision of the war even as it undermines that vision’s access to truth and ethical viability.”⁷³ At the same time that ethical viability is undermined, it is ethically necessary for the civilian to seek and recognize truth’s limits. The difficulty multiplies when those suffering are strangers who are dying en masse out of sight and sound in circumstances that bear no relation to those of the bystanders, who learn of their circumstances in highly mediated, if relatively immediate, ways. The poem is less concerned with portraying the perfection or fallibility of remote apprehension of Civil War suffering than with posing it as a problem to be articulated, considered, and analyzed, if not solved. New communication technologies, Melville suggests, require new ways of processing the information that is transmitted, because the medium and its particular forms of mediation change the message. Whereas Thomson perhaps believed he had found a solution to the problem by summoning a perfect sympathy in readers through the image of a suffering individual, and Cowper showed the inadequacy of Thomson’s solution for newspaper readers in the age of empire, Melville tenaciously explores both the impulse to understand another’s suffering and the obstacles that impede that understanding in the hopes of finding a way to some partial insight. He does not so much critique human limitation as try to work within it, since the rhetoric of war that people share—poetic traditions and current poetic practices, the proliferation of journalistic reportage in all its heterogeneity—is the only available medium of communication.

Though U.S. Civil War poetry acknowledges and draws from a British poetic tradition of imagining war at a distance via figures of the weather, coterminous and cooperative developments in technologies of killing and communication demand new figurations of the climates of war. If reading the newspaper generates dislocated feelings on the part of readers remote from their nation’s conflicts, the increasingly rapid and continuous transmission of information—what Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. calls “perpetual intercommunication” via national “nervous networks”—intensifies the strangeness; Holmes tells us that readers of the news experience a version of the “war fever” that soldiers experience in battle.⁷⁴ If soldiers are overwhelmed by the proximity of massive violence, readers at home are overwhelmed by a continuous bombardment of information about bombardments. The problem of remoteness is complicated by the fact that the Civil War was both far and near, internal and external, at home and abroad, depending on one’s geographical location, Union or Confederate perspective, and personal investments. Receiving news of war at a distance prevented readers from fully distinguishing between internal and external states of mind and country.

While all the poets discussed express skepticism over the possibility of perfect understanding between onlookers and sufferers, they nevertheless foreground a universal tendency—of poetry, journalism, reporters, poets, soldiers, and listeners—to create meaning in events by forging imaginative relations. The trope of choice is metaphor. Metaphor, after all, has its root in the idea of transport; it is suited to reconfiguring significance within circulatory networks. To establish relations between inner and outer states, all the poems, and all the players in the poem “Donelson,” metaphorize their surroundings. They do this in particular via the weather. A single line serves as an example: “The lancing sleet cut him who stared into the storm.”⁷⁵ After an immersion in the atmospheric approach of “Donelson” to linguistic representation, it is clear that metaphor is at work here, but it is unclear what is the tenor and what is the vehicle: Does a soldier stare into an actual storm, weaponizing it in his reverie? Does a listener stare into the storm of war? Are we readers staring at a stormy poem that throws “a shower of broken ice and snow, / In lieu of words”?⁷⁶ Interior and exterior states, states of mind and states of weather, battlefield attacks and storms, all run together, the “way a river flows / And there the whelming waters meet.”⁷⁷ In Civil War poetry, the coincident, interpenetrating, and transitive circulation of weather, troops, and news generates instabilities in the metaphoric and symbolic properties of language; poetry’s task is to reconfigure expression so that even at a distance, war can make an impression.