Come up from the Fields Father

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Come up from the Fields Father
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Context

• The American Civil War 1861-5
• Americans fought each other.
• The war between the Northern Union and Southern
  Confederacy began in 1861. The North, led by
  President Lincoln, wished to end slavery the
  South resisted and decided to leave the Union
  (i.e. the United States). The Norths victory in
  the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 was the turning
  point that led to the final defeat of the South
  in 1865.

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Story of the poem

• On a beautiful day in autumn in a beautiful
  landscape, a farming family in Ohio (a Northern
  state) receive a letter from the front about
  their son, Pete. It says he has been shot and
  taken to hospital. It claims he will get better.
  The daughters try to console their mother. The
  son is dead and the mother is left to grieve with
  little will to continue living herself.

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Contrast

• where the trees deeper green, yellower and
  redder, cool and sweeten Ohios villages with
  leaves fluttering in the moderate wind.
• The sky so calm, so transparent after the rain,
  and with wondrous clouds, below too, all calm,
  all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers
  well.

• O a strange hand writes for our dear son, o
  stricken mothers soul!
• All swims before her eyes, flashes with black,
  she catches the main words only,
• Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast,
  cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
• At present low, but will soon be better.

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Contrast
The colours of autumn are vividly captured
creating a sense of harvest and abundance. The
colours are deeper suggesting strength and
vitality. A pastoral image of harmony and
tranquillity is created where the villages leaves
cool and sweeten the Ohio villages. The natural
abundance and beauty is continued with the
apples ripe and grapes on the trellised
vines their aromatic sweetness suggested by the
repetition of smell you the smell. The beauty
of the scene is extended by the vast calm skies
that seem so clear and suggest an openness, a
land at peace with itself.

• where the trees deeper green, yellower and
  redder, cool and sweeten Ohios villages with
  leaves fluttering in the moderate wind.
• Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes
  on the trellised vines
• (smell you the smell of the grapes on the
  vines?)
• The sky so calm, so transparent after the rain,
  and with wondrous clouds, below too, all calm,
  all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers
  well.

• O a strange hand writes for our dear son, o
  stricken mothers soul!
• All swims before her eyes, flashes with black,
  she catches the main words only,
• Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast,
  cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
• At present low, but will soon be better.

This image of peace is shattered by the contrast
of the opening of the letter. The sentences
themselves are broken and fragmented imitating
the nervousness of the mother as she reads the
lines, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry
skirmish, taken to hospital. The mother jumbles
everything together as she tries to make sense of
it all. The repetition of the exclamatory o
captures the mothers fear and disbelief. Her
world has been destroyed by the news, emphasised
by the poets choice of the harsh sounding and
emotive stricken. Unlike the calmness of the
skies and the union of man and nature in the
opening stanzas, here the mother is disconnected
as the world swims and flashes before her.
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Whitmans voice

• Alas poor boy, he will never be better (nor
  maybe needs to be better, that brave and simple
  soul,)
• While they stand at home at the door he is dead
  already,
• The only son is dead.

• Whitman soon lost his early enthusiasm for the
  Civil War. He worked as a wound dresser tending
  battle victims in primitive camp hospitals. He
  recorded the horror and suffering he saw there in
  his poems. What does this stanza show us about
  Whitmans attitude to the war and its victims?

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Sadness and pathos

• Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous,
  her steps trembling,
• She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust
  her cap.
• O stricken mothers soul!
• All swims before her eyes, flashes with black
• She with thin form presently drest in black,
• Fitfully sleepingoften waking...weeping, longing
  with one deep longing
• O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from
  life escape and withdraw
• To follow, to seek, to be with her dead son.

• Which words and phrases make us feel pity for the
  mother and show her sadness?

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Grief and suffering

• Whitman wrote these lines in another poem about
  the battle dead.
• I saw battle corpses, myriads of them,
• And the white skeletons of young men I saw
  them
• But I saw they were not as was thought
• They themselves were fully at rest they
  suffered not
• The living remained and suffered the mother
  suffered
• And the wife and the child, and the musing
  comrade suffered.

• Last stanza of Come up from the fields father
• But the mother needs to be better,
• She with thin form presently drest in black,
• By day her meals untouched, then at night
  fitfully sleeping, often waking,
• In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one
  deep longing,
• O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from
  life escape and withdraw,
• To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

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Free Verse

• This poem does not follow any rules in terms of
  rhythm, rhyme patterns or the length and style of
  stanzas. The poet is free to write it and set it
  out as he chooses. (Compare it, for example, to
  the very tightly structured ballads Battle of
  Blenheim and The Charge of the Light Brigade.)

• Why do you think Whitman wrote this poem in free
  verse?