Come Up from the Fields Father

In the poem Come Up from the Fields Father, Whitman draws a picture of the emotional distress so many families experienced during the Civil War. The poem describes a family receiving a letter that their son has been wounded. He places the setting in the autumn season where all of nature is reaching its prime of life just before the death of winter. The poem describes a family receiving a letter that their son has been wounded. He places the setting in the autumn season where all of nature is reaching its prime of life just before the death of winter. With this, Whitman depicts the unfairness of a young man having everything stripped away in the prime of his life. He wasn't even given the opportunity to reach his full potential before he was robbed of his future.
Even though the letter says her son will soon recover, the mother senses that something is horribly wrong. The fact that the words were written in the hand of someone other than her son troubles her greatly. Since all the men have gone off to war, the only people at home are the women and young girls left in a vulnerable and empty state. Their livelihood depends upon men, and without their only son the family will struggle to survive. The poem conveys the sheer hopelessness of the mother's grief.
Any hope they may have had for his survival is futile. Perhaps he was alive at the time the letter was written, but by the time it reaches their hands his life has come to an end. While the poem could have ended here, Whitman wanted his reader to feel and understand in some respect the sorrow of the mother and the deepest pain possible for a human being to experience.

Life no longer held as much meaning as before. The only thing she wanted was to be reunited with her son. A part of herself was now missing. She was incomplete with no possible way to become whole again. The loss was so deep and the pain so unbearable that she felt the only way to make it better would be to end her own life in order to be with