Year That Trembled
Year That Trembled - context Summary
Composed During the Civil War
In "Year that Trembled" Whitman confronts the collapse of his earlier optimism as national trauma intrudes. The speaker feels physical warmth yet internal cold, a metaphor for hope turning to gloom. He asks whether to replace triumphant songs with cold dirges
and sullen hymns of defeat. Written amid Whitman’s disillusionment during the American Civil War and included in Drum-Taps, it records personal and national grief.
YEAR that trembled and reel’d beneath me! Your summer wind was warm enough—yet the air I breathed froze me; A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me; Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself; Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? And sullen hymns of defeat?
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