O Sun of real peace! O hastening light!
O free and extatic! O what I here, preparing, warble for!
O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling, and take his height—
and you too, O my Ideal, will surely ascend!
O so amazing and broad— up there resplendent, darting and burning!
O vision prophetic, stagger'd with weight of light! with pouring glories!
O lips of my soul, already becoming powerless!
O ample and grand Presidentiads! Now the war, the war is over!
New history! new heroes! I project you!
Visions of poets! only you really last! sweep on! sweep on!
O heights too swift and dizzy yet!
O purged and luminous! you threaten me more than I can stand!
(I must not venture— the ground under my feet menaces me—
it will not support me: O future too immense,)—
O present, I return, while yet I may, to you.

First published in 1860 as part of Apostroph.

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LOOK DOWN FAIR MOON

Look down fair moon and
    bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's
    nimbus floods on
    faces ghastly,
    swollen, purple,
On the dead on their
    backs with arms
    toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted
    nimbus sacred moon.

First published in Drum-Taps (1865)

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RECONCILIATION

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again
    and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin— I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

First published in When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd (1865)

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SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE

Spirit whose work is done! spirit of dreadful hours!
Ere, departing, fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets;
Spirit of gloomiest fears and doubts, (yet onward ever unfaltering pressing;)
Spirit of many a solemn day, and many a savage scene! Electric spirit!
That with muttering voice, through the war now closed, like a tireless phantom flitted,
Rousing the land with breath of flame, while you beat and beat the drum;
—Now, as the sound of the drum, hollow and harsh to the last, reverberates round me;
As your ranks, your immortal ranks, return, return from the battles;
While the muskets of the young men yet lean over their shoulders;
While I look on the bayonets bristling over their shoulders;
While those slanted bayonets, whole forests of them, appearing in the distance,
    approach and pass on, returning homeward,
Moving with steady motion, swaying to and fro, to the right and left,
Evenly, lightly rising and falling, as the steps keep time;
—Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day;
Touch my mouth, ere you depart— press my lips close!
Leave me your pulses of rage! bequeath them to me! fill me with currents convulsive!
Let them scorch and blister out of my chants, when you are gone;
Let them identify you to the future, in these songs.

First published in When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd (1865)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass

Notes: These poems were written around the Civil War (1861-1865).
See Whitman, Dickinson, and Mathew Brady's Photos.