“Mr. BRADY has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” —New York Times, October 20, 1862
TEXT: Melville, “Shiloh” (1866) and Dickinson, “Stop for Death” (1862)
- Dickinson’s poem has 24 lines and six stanzas with variable rhyming (including slant rhymes), common meter (generally alternating four-beat and three-beat lines), and sometimes unpredictable punctuation
- Dickinson’s poem was written around 1862 but not published in her lifetime
- Melville’s poem has 19 lines lines with variable rhyming, meter, and punctuation
- Melville’s poem concerns a battle from April 1862 but was not written until 1865 and not published until 1866 in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
CONTEXT: Civil War Combat
- Traditional mortality estimates from the Civil War indicate that about 620,000 combatants (from both sides) died between 1861-1865; however, current scholarship estimates that mortality number was more likely around 750,000 in a nation of more than 31 million. By today’s population, that figure would equal around 7.5 million. These new figures come from a regression analysis of the US census records between 1860 and 1870 that help identify “missing” deaths. For comparison, the average annual natural death rate in the US during that period was about 750,000 people per year.
- And it is also true that most of the Civil War-related deaths were from disease, not combat. Civil War soldiers were TWICE AS LIKELY to die from camp diseases such as dysentery than from combat wounds.
SUBTEXT: Confronting Loss
- Why did Dickinson seem to confuse time in her poem –opening with a line about not stopping for “Death,” with “Immortality” in the carriage, by claiming the sun had “passed us” rather than the other way around or by ending with present tense that refers to “Centuries” of history that now “Feels shorter than the Day”?
“She wrote nearly half of her nearly eighteen hundred poems while a war raged obliquely in the background. It seems meaningful that Dickinson, who was a shocking poet and an American original, found it necessary to write poems of self-division at such a decisive moment of self-division for the country.” –Edward Hirsch, Heart, p. 63
- Was Melville’s “Shiloh” designed as a bitter, anti-war poem (as Hirsch suggests) or more as a sober, pro-war poem (perhaps in the Lincolnian sense)?
“[Melville] wasn’t writing poems as a reporter, a Northern apologist for the war, or a moral crusader. Rather, he presents a series of bitter, granular poems that rail against death on such mass scale. At times, he sounds like one of the disillusioned poets of World War I.” –Edward Hirsch, Heart, p. 55
“To the memory of the
THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
who in the war
for the maintenance of the Union
fell devotedly
under the flag of their fathers.”
METHODS CENTER —Thesis Statements
- Understand how to explain an interpretative claim