Delicate Cluster

Delicate Cluster - fact Summary

Included in Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman addresses a 'delicate cluster' that functions as a flag symbolizing both teeming life and death. The speaker watches the flag through battle smoke, hears it "flap and rustle," and alternately names its colors and textures—cerulean, silvery, woolly white, crimson—before elevating it to a maternal, sacred figure. The short poem fuses martial imagery with tender, reverent language to personify a communal emblem as mother and matron.