17 pages • 34 minutes read
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.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
"Vigil Strange” is technically a free verse poem—Whitman’s specialty—through many of the lines are scannable. The opening line, “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night” (Line 1), is trochaic pentameter: meter consisting of five stressed syllables in a line on which the first syllable receives the emphasis (this is the opposite of the more familiar iambic pentameter of Shakespearean verse).
Following this, Whitman offers a line in hexameter—six metrical feet in a line—and two lines of heptameter, or seven feet in a line. His refusal to conform and adhere to a singular poetic meter highlights the unique and distinctive nature of Whitman’s poetry. In “Vigil Strange,” the accumulating stresses in the opening of the poem is a technique found in other Whitman poems. The line lengths and stressed versus unstressed syllables in the lines are all quite deliberate choices—even though, upon first reading or an unfamiliarity with Whitman’s poetry, this may seem messy or confusing.
Syntax
This poem is noteworthy for Whitman’s inverted syntax. Even the title, repeated as the first line, inverts the expected word order. Instead of calling the poem “I Kept a Strange Vigil on the Field one Night,” Whitman reorders the line to emphasize both the disorientation of war and to focus readers’ attention on the poem’s keyword: “vigil.” This word recurs throughout the poem 12 times in total, and is always deployed in sentences with similarly inverted syntax—often in line openings, where it serves as a form of anaphora, which is a sequential word or phrase repetition at the beginning of lines close together in a text.
Whitman deliberately does this, as it requires readers to pay careful attention to the lines, and thus slow down despite the breathless quality of his free verse. In addition, it creates a sense of closure when the final two lines revert to more traditional declarative syntax: “I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, / And buried him where he fell” (Lines 25-26).
Repetition
In addition to the aforementioned anaphora, this poem is significant for what Whitman chooses to repeat as well as what he chooses not to repeat. The anaphora reinforces the activity of keeping vigil while also highlighting the words after that repetition. Whitman selects words that highlight the speaker’s emotional state, whether “strange” in Line 1 or “wondrous” and “sweet” in Line 10 or even Line 16’s use of “final,” which foreshadows the shift that will occur two lines later at the last parenthetical.
While many other words—including descriptions of the relationship between the two soldiers—are intentionally repeated, two key moments are not repeated. The young man’s death is described in Lines 2-4 but never returned to. While the speaker sheds “not a tear, not a word” (Line 13), he is not so unemotional as to revisit this traumatic moment. Similarly, the burial itself is relayed in a single line of seven syllables. This is not just the shortest line in the poem; it is also the most direct, as though Whitman’s speaker no longer needs the long catalogues of detail, asides, and symbols of the relationship between the two men. These decisions are starker, and their moments more memorable, thanks to Whitman’s decision to juxtapose them with the various repetitions that occur throughout the rest of the poem.
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By Walt Whitman
