Thick-Sprinkled Bunting: Our Flag and Its Poet

The best new thing that has emerged from the political campaign is a novel way of displaying the flag, not as a lonely drooping banner but as a giant bouquet of innumerable flags spread across the stage, colors ablaze—the stars-and-stripes as a garden landscape, a shimmery ocean, a harvest glory, a voluptuous sunset. Was it Donald Trump who popularized these over-the-top displays? Possibly it was. He has the con-man’s knack for theatrics. But Hillary Clinton, too, has taken to standing in front of star-spangled multi-flag extravaganzas. Likewise President Barack Obama. And Justin Trudeau in Ottawa has outdone everyone else. He hosted a “three amigos” summit just now—himself, President Obama, and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico—at which everyone denounced populist charlatans. Peña Nieto muttered darkly about Hitler and Mussolini. It was good. But best of all was the wild display of national flags—the red-white-and-blue, the red-and-white, the green-white-and-red—arrayed like a magic forest for the amigos to traverse on their way to the microphones, mythic heroes surrounded by undulating hues.

I have been reading Whitman on the American flag. He wrote about it repeatedly, though I think only during the years of the Civil War—years of ferocity and sorrow. Naturally his flags are living things. They sing, gaze, beckon, ripple, and pass by. The flag in “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” exhorts the poet himself to speak up: “Yet louder, higher, stronger, bard! yet farther, wider cleave!” The flag sings of the higher values—of more than wealth, and more than peace. Sometimes the flag is womanly. One of his war poems was a not-entirely successful ode to the flag called “Bathed in War’s Perfume,” which he never inserted into Leaves of Grass:

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