character to the climate they lived in: southerners were supposedly more hot-blooded and emotional, northerners more temperate and rational.7 As much as climate separates and differentiates, however, observing the weather allows those differences to be physically imagined at a distance, at least according to Civil War poets: watching snowflakes fall in Massachusetts, for example, summons the thought of soldiers falling on Southern battlefields in uncountable numbers. The U.S. Civil War was external and internal simultaneously, because one nation threatened to become two. What was far away for Northern civilians could be in the backyard of their Southern counterparts, so that proximity and distance are held in a complex, ever-shifting relation, and the weather reports in newspapers and poetry of the period tried to chart and make sense of these dynamics.
Figure 4. “March of the Army of the Potomac towards Richard’s Ford, Rappahannock River, under General Burnside, interrupted by the storm of Wednesday, January 21.—From a Sketch by our Special Artist,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 14, 1863, 328–329. Courtesy of HarpWeek.
In “The Snow at Fredericksburg,” for example, published on January 31, 1863, the anonymous author uses the snowfall to draw together the enormous number of dead Union soldiers and their mourners over the distance between the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862) and the Northern home front. The speaker addresses the snow:
And here, where lieth the high of heart,
Drift—white as the bridal veil—
That will never be worn by the drooping girl
Who sitteth afar, so pale.
Fall, fast as the tears of the suffering wife,
Who stretcheth despairing hands
Out to the blood-rich battle-fields
That crimson the Eastern sands!
Fall in thy virgin tenderness,
Oh delicate snow, and cover
The graves of our heroes, sanctified
Husband and son and lover!
Drift tenderly over those yellow slopes,
And mellow our deep distress,
And put us in mind of the shriven souls
And their mantles of righteousness!8
Versatile in its amorphous whiteness, the snow offers myriad “strange analogies”: a ghostly version of the bridal veil the girl will not wear, of the widow’s tears, of the sanctification the buried soldiers lack. It whitens the crimson blood, it reaches where the widow can’t, it softens sadness and stands for the heroism and virtue of the fallen soldiers. Snow didn’t fall during the Battle of Fredericksburg—a Confederate victory with huge death tolls—though the poem suggests that it fell afterward both at home and on the battlefield.9 The poem’s snow imaginatively counters the stark images of the dead in the illustrated newspapers, serving as an active response to the coverage of the war. The poet calls on the snow to soften the news of the unidentified dead far from home, to reach backward toward the news’ emergence in a gesture of mourning and patriotism (fig. 5).
This chapter examines a cluster of poems that adapt a meteorological poetic tradition to the particular circumstances of a civil war with enormous death tolls in a mass media age. Science of the period had recently come to understand weather as a global system, which meant that what goes around comes around: what is elsewhere will eventually arrive here, perhaps in altered form.10 The figure of snow set alongside its physical reality enables a poetic contemplation of war as a massive circulatory system that involves civilians and soldiers alike. The first section, “An Even Face,” follows the ways snow’s capacity for erasure summons the death tolls of Southern battlefields for Northern civilians, as well as their own insularity from immediate physical harm. The second section traces figures of weather in Confederate poet Henry Timrod’s work in order to demonstrate that poetry itself works like a circulatory system across sectional lines during the war; Timrod offers a response to a primarily northern tradition of snow poems, figuring the South as a nation well-fortified in preparation for the North’s fierce storms. The final section brings together North and South, home front and battlefront, snow and its tropes via an analysis of Herman Melville’s “Donelson,” a nuanced meditation on weather and war focused on a battle that took place in a deadly snowstorm. Unlike the other poems in the chapter, Melville’s demands of his reader a complete immersion in the details of the event as well as their widespread, multiply mediated circulation in order to begin understanding the complexities of media reception of war at a distance. The poem offers an occasion to think about the massive challenges confronting soldiers in the field as well as the conditions that necessarily impede civilian understanding. By stressing the immersion of soldiers and civilians in particular conditions at specific locations, Melville shows the way that war, weather, and media draw people together within overlapping circulatory systems in ways that are only partially knowable.
Figure 5. “The dead around the regimental flag of the 8th Ohio, in front of the ‘Stonewall’ at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Sketched by Our Special Artist, Arthur Lumley,” New York Illustrated News, January 10, 1863, 145. Courtesy of HarpWeek.
“An Even Face”
In 1726, James Thomson was already thinking about the problem of how to feel about suffering from a comfortable distance. In “Winter,” the first of the poems later collected in The Seasons, Thomson’s central concern is whether anyone cares for those who suffer elsewhere. The speaker imagines someone less fortunate than himself floundering and dying in a blizzard, then extrapolates from that scenario to wonder
How many feel, this very moment, death,
And all the sad variety of pain.
How many sink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame. How many bleed,
By shameful variance betwixt man and man.11
Thomson’s multiplication of “how manys” makes the point that neither he nor anyone else can “feel, this very moment” with multitudes suffering elsewhere. Their plights are so abstracted in his list that the poem charges common expressions of sympathy with failing to summon more than a general idea of a problem. His poetic solution to generality is to evoke an individual, sentimental scenario, “One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,” in the hopes that it will summon “the social tear … the social sigh,” which, in turn will make “the social passions work.”12 Thomson raises the question of whether that scenario succeeds in making a reader feel.
Responding to “Winter” almost sixty years later, William Cowper’s “Winter’s Evening,” in The Task (1785), expresses skepticism about the ability of poetry to summon the social tear or the social sigh for distant suffering.13 He identifies the newspaper as the source of an enhanced indifference; his summary “argument of the fourth book” portrays a newly remote reader: “The post comes in. The newspaper is read. The world contemplated at a distance. Address to Winter.”14 The relation between the contemplation of the world and the address to winter is itself disjunct. Whereas Thomson summoned a swain who wallowed and died
