As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

It seems odd to suggest that this poem is tragic, that it is sobering and cautious, restrained and uncertain—seldom adjectives applied to any Whitman poem. The poet here celebrates the recovery of his nation from the devastation and brutalities of the self-inflicted horrors of the Civil War, at the time of the writing still vivid within the national consciousness. Everywhere he turns his wide-eyed lens he chronicles the evidence of that recovery, the emergence of new inventions, the energy of ever-expanding cities, the factories that never quiet, and the hum and buzz of perpetual commerce.

Yet the Civil War has taken its toll on the poet, a grim and disquieting reality that he inserts between parentheses early on in the poem. It is his darkest moment, his acknowledgement that what the war taught him was the inevitability of war itself. As such, within parentheticals, this dark suggestion works as a kind of minor-key contrapuntal movement against the poem’s otherwise heroic optimism. Whitman, born in the ecstatic ebullience of the first-generation of Americans not born British subjects, lived to see that bold and vigorous experiment fall not to some invading empire but to itself, to its own greed and anger.

Whitman’s verse after the war reflects that he has learned the precarious nature of the kind of peace that ensures the evolution of his beloved country.