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Walt WhitmanVigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
With the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman emerged as a truly original voice. This date is not a coincidence, as the collection—and Whitman’s entire career—can be viewed as a celebration of the American experience. As a child in 1824 he attended General Lafayette’s grand tour visit to Brooklyn. The Revolutionary War hero fixated on five-year-old Whitman, lifting him from among the throng and offering a hearty embrace.
Whitman is known for his long lines, filled with lists and compendiums of information. These disquisitions seek to capture all of America, as in the poem “I Hear America Singing,” where he includes mechanics and masons, shoemakers and woodcutters, and mothers and girls. As a result, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” may seem anachronistic at first glance with its focus on a private moment between a soldier and his fallen comrade. However, the poem illustrates the great poet’s range. While Whitman is most known for his “barbaric yawp” and his celebration of the individual—the original title of Leaves of Grass was Song of Myself—this poem shows his ability to confront death without despairing. The speaker sheds no tears because he is confident the pair “shall surely meet again” (Line 17). Ultimately, his beliefs in the nation and in the cause of abolition show that this soldier’s death would not be in vain any more than the loss of Lincoln— elegized in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—would. Here, Whitman uses a personal event as an opportunity to memorialize for posterity an individual soldier.
Historical Context
The inspiration for “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” is often ascribed to the death of William Giggie during the second battle of Manassas on August 29, 1862. Private Giggie, along with another soldier named Arthur Giggie, was a member of a New York regiment in the Union army. Scholar Martin G. Murray has unearthed evidence that the two men were so close that Arthur took William’s last name as his own to symbolize the bond between them. Murray writes “[t]hat the poem was based on the death of an actual person whom Whitman knew reinforces its elegiac qualities, particularly as the poem is presented through the eyes of the principal survivor and mourner” (193).
Whitman heard of the incident while serving in a military hospital in Washington D.C., after his brother’s wounding at the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. During this period, Whitman alternated working in the hospital with writing Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, both comprised of poems related to the American Civil War and his first-hand observations of the wounded. Whitman remained in Washington through the end of the war before taking a position as a clerk, post-War, that kept him in the city until a stroke in 1873.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
