If Timrod is deploying that conventional rhetoric, then he is suggesting that the Northern “tyrants” and the white Southerners they “enslave” are equally responsible for turning the earth into a repository of death, destroying the animating cycle of life. If Timrod means to suggest that Northerners, along with actual Southern slaves, are responsible for the carnage, he has mixed that conventional metaphoric use of “slave” with its literal meaning. In that case, he is explicitly admitting the fact of slavery in his tribute to Southern purity when he very clearly avoided the topic in “Ethnogenesis” and “The Cotton Boll” because it disrupted the pastoral ideal of the peaceful and effortlessly bountiful South. And if the slaves are literal slaves, then the fact that their graves are overwhelming Spring’s meads and staining the daisies suggests that white Southerners, again, have blood on their hands. Death and injustice have infiltrated Timrod’s vision of Southern righteousness. He cannot make the South as pure as the driven snow, or as the cultivated cotton. He doesn’t need to explicitly acknowledge the failure on that score for it to be evident in the logic of the poem.
The beginning of a complex pattern emerges that offers insight into the aesthetics and ethics of violence in U.S. Civil War poetry, North and South. When confronted with the fact of violent, divisive conflict, Allen, Dickinson, and Timrod all look to the sky for explanation. Early in the war, Timrod, like Emerson before him, asserts the transformative power of the imagination; Emerson’s night wind and Timrod’s seasons both create a fleecy substance that covers the existing world and remakes it into an idealized wonderland. For Emerson, writing more than two decades before the war, that wonderland is created by a force described in militaristic terms that are clearly whimsical; Timrod, in 1861, also whimsically, enlists nature to fight for the Confederacy. Emerson aestheticizes the weather in order to give shape to an abstract idea, while Timrod summons aesthetic power to vaporize commodities—cotton and slaves—and turn them into ethereal symbols. Cotton becomes a mode of communication analogous to the North’s mass media networks; Timrod imagines cotton traveling far and wide, like tropical winds, touching people in foreign lands and converting them to the Southern cause. In 1861, Timrod in South Carolina, surrounded by the unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, violence of slavery, which he seeks to justify without mentioning, turns slave labor into twilight in order to make present violence remote. He fails; dusky fingers and boastful smiles, however idealized, return us to the material subjects he begins to erase. Dickinson and Allen, at a distance from the war, conversely draw upon the weather to materialize the news of the battlefront at home; winter’s freezing temperatures and frozen precipitation brings the war home, in all its remoteness. By 1863, Timrod comes closer to their understanding of the ethical relation between materiality and metaphor. All three wartime poets, as distinguished from Emerson’s earlier practice, show the ways that events shape perception as much as perception shapes events. Involuntarily, perhaps, the Civil War poets must leave themselves open to the elements—including an elemental media environment—and whatever they carry with them through the air. The next section shows Melville working within this tradition, but binding it tightly to the historical details of weather in wartime and its devastating impact on physical bodies; his insistence on explicitly articulating the physical ground for the proliferation of figural practices allows us to explore the media underpinnings of this circulation of literary meditations on wartime violence.
“The storms behind the storms we feel” in “Donelson”
Melville locates his 1866 collection Battle-Pieces, or Aspects of the War, and particularly “Donelson,” within this tradition of contemplating the question of remote suffering via figures of the weather (indeed, he prepared to write his first book of poems by reading Thomson’s poems, among others).49 Melville identifies the abstraction of violence into figures of weather as a problem as well as a necessity for thinking about war at a distance; the abstraction is an inevitable result of the mediated immediacy of the Civil War’s reception. The difficulty of apprehending mass suffering that both Thomson and Cowper identify is made newly specific and urgent in Melville’s poem, for the masses are Confederate and Union soldiers, killing each other at a distance from the Northern home front, but, at least for Unionists, within the boundaries of the same nation. Near and far are therefore juxtaposed with extreme compression that, in turn, pressures the poet to generate “strange analogies” and new “combinations” in response.
Melville stages this scenario in all its complexity in “Donelson.” The poem juxtaposes reportage of the Tennessee battle on the banks of the Cumberland River, which took place in stormy weather February 11–16, 1862, with reception of the news via telegraph, also in stormy weather, at a city bulletin board in the North. Day after day, people surround the board, eagerly awaiting each additional posting, responding changefully and fitfully as the story unfolds. Rather than stressing the miraculous quality of the rapid transmission of the news, as do many of his contemporaries, Melville makes the highly mediated and imperfect transmission of information the subject of the poem. He foregrounds the impressionism of the reporter, the remarks of an editor, the weather’s disruptions of telegraphic transmission, errors in the reportage, the further intermediary steps of the man who posts the bulletins, and of another man who reads them to the crowd. He emphasizes his own layers of poetic mediation as well. Doubling the figure of the journalist reporting on the battle, the poet is “our own reporter,” who “a dispatch compiles, /As best he may, from varied sources.”50 Melville presents his poem as a theatrical staging or script, in which different tenses and fonts are used for those on the home front reading and listening to the news and those who compose and disseminate the news.51
Melville meticulously follows the reportage of the event, as if it were crucial in accessing whatever comprehension of the war might be possible. Indeed, “Donelson” is partially constituted of newspaper reports; it is not simply a poetic rendition of them. In writing the poem, Melville pored over newspapers; as Frank Day has demonstrated, “Donelson” is saturated in quotations and paraphrases from the coverage more than any other poem in the collection, many of which foreground their intensive debt to journalistic sources.52 Those sources, in turn, are steeped in linguistic conventions derived from a romantic poetic tradition, so that it is impossible to stipulate where the poem leaves off and its newspaper sources begin: paraphrasing blurs the difference. In offering this hybrid form, Melville presents his reader with a range of entangled questions: What is the difference, if any, in the information derived from newspaper reportage and poetry? How can poems make us feel the news, and vice versa? What is the relation between media and genre? These questions cloud and complicate the relation among suffering, its representations, and their reception. This endless complication is the subject of inquiry, and the weather is Melville’s mode. Melville takes the battle’s circumstances—a cold snap in Tennessee kills primarily Northern soldiers supposedly more accustomed to cold weather—as an occasion to meditate on the rhetorical and psychological functions of weather in wartime in their unsettled and unsettling configurations. The poem ricochets back and forth between the home front and the war front, mimicking media circuitry, and I will follow the form in my analysis of the deliberately overwhelming complexity of the poem.
Melville follows the minutely detailed temporal unfolding of ongoing, unsynthesized reports on the ground to convey a sense of the radical shifts in subjectivity that accompany unpredictable shifts of both weather and war. Strange analogies are formed between Melville’s crowd around the bulletin board and the soldiers on the distant battlefield, and it is up to the poem’s reader to discern their significance. Meteorological thinking is ubiquitous in the poem—it is its atmosphere—and it works in every which way. At first, there is a difference between the weather on the home front and the battle-front. A crowd gathers around the board even though they are “pelted by sleet in the icy street”; they go home at night, frustrated that the story is unfinished, and return again in the daytime.53
The listeners hear news of balmy weather in the South—recited by a “tall” man, who reads the reports aloud—and the troops, as well as the reporter, are in high spirits. Melville’s lyrical reporter of events seems inappropriately stuck in romantic modes of describing the weather:
