Walt Whitman: Poems

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly

lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash

again, and ever again, this soiled world.

For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead.

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;

I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.