The ancient boughs that lace together
Along the stream, and hang far forth,
Strange with green mistletoe, betray
A dreamy contrast to the North.54
The reporter could be setting the stage for an encounter between lovers, rather than armies; the “dreamy contrast” suggests that Southern weather seduces the Northern soldiers, who perceive a beautiful, possibly deceptive, wonderland. While the passage is in the Wordsworthian tradition of nature poetry, it nevertheless also enhances the New York Times’ own enamored report of Tennessee’s weather: “The scene here was magnificent beyond description—the night was as warm as an evening in August, in our more northern latitudes, a full moon looked down from an unclouded sky, and glanced off the bayonets, plumes, and sword-hilts without number.”55 The soldiers glittering in the moonlight offer a romantic vision of military engagement that later reportage on the conflict will make a mockery of. The deeply harmonious relation between the poem and the Times report suggests that Melville’s poem resonates with the news rather than, or in addition to, simply critiquing it, as some readers have suggested.56 Perhaps because of its inconsequentiality, this first report, transmitted on Wednesday the twelfth in the poem’s meticulous timeline, has no readers on the home front; the bad weather is enough to discourage reading so that the bulletin was simply “Washed by the storm till the paper grew / Every shade of streaky blue.”57
Melville suggests not simply that the reporter is unreliable, but that it would be impossible to generate a truthful and coherent account of such rapidly shifting conditions and events; the analogies the poem draws between Union troops and shifting weather cannot be stabilized into a patriotic narrative of destined victory. As the poem unfolds alongside the battle, the conditions shift radically, as does the reporter’s viewpoint. On Thursday the weather turned severely cold, making the skirmishes in the woods around the fort physically painful as well as deadly. The reporter blends the fighting men with the weather: “we stormed them on their left / A chilly change in the afternoon.”58 The “chilly change” is a drop in temperature, but it is also a turn for the worse in the soldiers’ circumstances. “ The cold incites / To swinging of arms with brisk rebound.” Melville makes no distinction between human limbs and their military extensions; the need for warmth causes men to move their “arms,” which in turn causes them to fight more fiercely. Men’s actions are fueled by their natural surroundings, no longer through a romantic reverie, but in a metonymic fusion of deadly forces. Imagining, as Whitman does, that the weather sympathizes with human events, the reporter persistently suggests that the weather is on the Union’s side: he tells us “The sky is dun /Fordooming the fall of Donelson,” and urges the Union soldiers to victory. The Times report that was one of Melville’s primary sources for “Donelson” is equally saturated with this logic: “Thursday morning dawned beautifully, and seemed to smile upon the efforts of the national troops. The men cheerfully accepted the omen.”59 The poem’s reporter further states that the people of Tennessee have never seen such cold weather and believe the Northern soldiers brought it: “ Yea the earnest North /Has elementally issued forth / To storm this Donelson.” This insistence on the weather’s Union sympathies is particularly incongruous in this case, however, because in fact, the weather turned vicious, and the Northerners suffered severely from it. Experiencing a balmy day on the march to Donelson, the Union soldiers discarded their coats and blankets. Two days later, many of them froze to death in the sleet and snow, dying of exposure.60 The reader of “Donelson” might note at this point that the reporter’s initial report must then be incorrect—residents of Tennessee understand that the weather can change suddenly from balmy to cold, so they weren’t imagining it as an accompaniment to righteous Northern wrath, and it is the Northerners who project an ill-fitting tropical ideal onto the region, at great cost. But the correspondent doesn’t revise, or even seemingly remember, his own previous figuration. It is left to the “listeners” at the bulletin board within the poem and the readers of the poem to note, or to overlook, the dramatic irony.
The reporter’s meticulous, elaborately crafted description of the first day of battle is wasted on the people reading and listening to those reports. When Melville shifts to the reception on the home front, we see that, jarringly, no one notes the suffering of the soldiers. They use the occasion not to think about what has happened at Donelson, but to express their simplistic, overly general opinions about the fight. The first man to speak is merely irritated at the tedious length of the conflict: “‘Twill drag along—drag along,’ / Growled a cross patriot.”61 Another offers a cheer for Grant that “urchins” and some adults mindlessly repeat. A “Copperhead” reminds the crowd that the Confederates are giving the Union a good fight.62 The disconnection between home front and war front is complete; the civilians use the report as an occasion to editorialize without a thought to the suffering of those who are fighting the war.
As Friday’s report grows more gruesome it is clear that the reporter himself is at a loss, having shifted rhetorical modes rapidly in ways that don’t properly accommodate the suffering he is trying to convey. The prospects seem dimmer for the Union; the weather turns worse, so that “hapless wounded men were frozen.” Again the reporter finds an inappropriately romantic simile—“Our heedless boys / Were nipped like blossoms”—but this is not because he is callous. As if unsure of how to convey such an event—the boys dying not only by bullets but also by frost—just a few lines later he offers a completely different metaphor that conflicts with the first: the Union soldiers are now “ice-glazed corpses, each a stone / A sacrifice to Donelson.”63 Now he has turned to the language of patriotic sacrifice to recuperate the losses, but the odd juxtaposition of the two unrelated registers of diction suggest that he doesn’t know how to give meaning to the happenstance of Northern soldiers freezing to death during a battle in Tennessee.64
Timothy Sweet has suggested that in deploying these verbal clichés Melville critiques the ways patriotic rhetoric dehumanizes soldiers and defaces their suffering. He argues that the poem exposes how wartime poetic discourse and journalistic reportage “aestheticize the war,” thus contributing to the ideological work of converting casualties into symbols of patriotic sacrifice: “ideological discourse displaces the body” “once the body has served its purpose in war.”65 This claim overlooks both the struggle to find adequate language on the part of the reporter as well as Melville’s own immersion in the heterogeneous rhetorical conventions he “compiles.” The reporter is searching for ways, however ineptly, to convey, rather than erase, the plight of the Northern soldiers. His observations exceed the pro-Union narrative he places upon them: this complicates Sweet’s thesis of an ironclad, inescapable ideology. Rather, projecting simplified, sense-making narratives on chaotic events is a tendency that no one in the poem is immune to, even though those stories coexist with all kinds of information that refutes them. The poem’s journalist reports that the soldiers who witness their comrades freezing tell themselves “it is a sacrifice to Donelson”: “They swear it, and swerve not, gazing on / A flag, deemed black, flying from Donelson.”66 Thinking about the slaughter in this way, Melville suggests, is a survival strategy, and the soldiers themselves may well know that if they don’t keep swearing to themselves, they could give up and freeze even sooner. Their awareness of the pragmatic quality of their belief is suggested by the word “deem,” as if they know that imagining the enemy as an evil empire with a black flag will help them survive. Their practical self-deceit is further underscored by the immediately subsequent observation that the Confederate soldiers do what they can to help their freezing foes even though they too are “in shivering plight”:
Some of the wounded in the wood
Were cared for by the foe last night,
Though he could do them little needed good,
Himself
