Rosanna Warren reads Herman Melville’s “The March into Virginia”
Poetry of America: A Collection of Field Recordings by Award-winning Contemporary Poets

Rosanna Warren reads Herman Melville’s “The March into Virginia”

Transcription of Commentary

I am Rosanna Warren. I am reading the poem, “The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas” by Herman Melville.

This poem appeared in Melville’s collection of poetry Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which he published in August 1866 at the end of the Civil War. It’s a poem much concerned with identity: North or South? Youth or age? What is it to be an American? What is it to be living? What is it to be dead? What is it to be ignorant? What is it to be (as the poem says) “enlightened?” The Battle of Bull Run, also called First Manassas, was fought on July 20th and 21 in 1861—one of the first major battles of the war—and in it the Union army of the North commanded by General McDowell was 35,000 men strong and marched out from Washington to meet the Confederates on the field at Manassas Junction, Virginia, just 20 miles away from Washington, D.C. The Union forces were so convinced of their superiority that they treated it like a picnic, or as Melville says, a “berrying party”— not b-u-r-y-i-n-g, which is the pun hidden there, but “berrying”—as in collecting b-e-r-r-i-e-s: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries. And so convinced was the North of its victory that civilians went out from Washington in their carriages and on horseback with picnic baskets and bottles of wine as if it were a sporting event they were going to witness and cheer on. What happened was a furious, bloody battle and a humiliating defeat for the North. There was revealed the military genius of the Southern commander who became known as Stonewall Jackson because in this battle he stood, as they said, like a stone wall and repulsed the Northern troops. So even though the Confederate army of 31,000 there under General Beauregard was smaller than the Union, they outfought them and outwitted them. The best description of the humiliation of the Northern army is by Walt Whitman, who wasn’t present at the battle, but was in Washington at the time and described the return of the defeated soldiers in his book, Specimen Days.

Here’s Whitman:

The defeated troops commenced pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge at daylight on Monday, 22d—day drizzling all through with rain. The Saturday and Sunday of the battle (20th, 21st,) had been parch’d and hot to an extreme—the dust, the grime and smoke, in layers, sweated in, follow’d by other layers again sweated in, absorb’d by those excited souls—their clothes all saturated with the clay-powder filling the air—stirr’d up everywhere on the dry roads and trodden fields by the regiments, swarming wagons, artillery, &c.—all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge—a horrible march of twenty miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck. Where are the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you went forth? Where are your banners, and your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing—and there isn’t a flag but clings ashamed and lank to its staff.

Melville’s focus in his poem is on the boys, on the youth of the soldiers; as he says, “All wars are boyish and are fought by boys.” And, master poet that he is, he understands that meaning is carried by sound patterning in poetry. He gives us a very powerful patterning with the sound of “b”; we’ve already had the cue that “b” is associated with the boys—“all wars are boyish”—so we get these other “b” words like the sexual energy of the boys in the phrase “turbid ardors,” “Not barrenly abate,” with “banners,” “bugles,” “berrying party,” the air is “blue.” And the “b”s reach their height, their intensity, in the god Bacchus, in “Bacchic glee they file toward fate.” Bacchus, the god of wine, the god of freedom, the god of wild celebration. This is the boys’ ignorance, this “Bacchic glee,” they think it will be a wild party, this battle. In the very next line they are delivered to a very different god, Moloch. Moloch, the god, the Ammonite god of the ancient Near East, worshipped by the Canaanites and the Phoenicians through child sacrifice. This poem shows us that Melville regarded the Civil War as, among other things, child sacrifice. And part of the, I’d say, moral wisdom of this poem and its drama of identity and of Melville’s whole book Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War is that he didn’t finally take sides as so many of the other contemporary poems did at the time, either pro-North or pro-South. Melville was a Northerner. He hated slavery. There was no question about his allegiance in this war, but his contemplation of the larger tragedy of the war went far beyond partisanship. He saw it as a dreadful, fratricidal killing of the children and killing of certain democratic possibilities in order to make possible other democratic possibilities, which he held sacred, as did Lincoln.

Other points to make about this poem: the somewhat irregular pattern of the metrics; it veers between four-beat lines, three-beat lines, sometimes goes out to authoritative five-beat line as in “all wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” And the pattern of light and dark, so that, in the early part of the poem, the boys are marching out to war in lightsome files, that means they’re in a kind of radiant light of hope and youthful ignorance, but what they experience, ironically, some of them by dying, is enlightenment as Melville says, “Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare;” that is the blaze of the rifle fire and the canon shot. “What good is it to be enlightened if you are dead?” the poem seems to ask us.

This poem is in the public domain.