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 soil'd 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;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin.
The revolutionary war determined who we are not. (subjects of a distant realm) The Civil War determined who we are and must be. Walt Whitman help guide us throught the unspeakable pain it took to become a real nation.