Battle Lines - Eliza Richards

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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.

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      “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

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