Walt Whitman Poem

I read “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Grim” by Walt Whitman.  It is about a soldier in a war.  The soldier wakes up in the early morning and walks to the hospital tent.  He sees three dead bodies.  One is an old man, one is a boy, and one is a young, probably middle-age man.  He compares the middle-aged man to Christ.  He compares the deaths of these soldiers to the death of Christ.  The main argument is that war is bad and causes death and destruction. He proves it by equating the death of Christ to the death of a soldier.

Whitman uses lots of imagery to help further his point.  The reader gets the sense that everything is cold, gray, and bleak.

He uses inverted syntax. An example is “As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless.”

It is interesting that he has it take place in the morning. Morning is when everything is waking and the sun is rising; it’s usually associated with life, not death.