Leaves of Grass

The “Jonathan” addressed directly in the first line and also in the last lines is a generic Bostonian: The name Jonathan was often used as a shorthand for the average American man, as during the Revolutionary war, British soldiers referred to Americans as Jonathans. 

This is a protest poem. Unlike a Jonathan, the spectator who is enjoying what he sees because he supports what the narrator regards as an unjust law, the speaker only sarcastically refers to the arrest and march of the captured Anthony Burns as a “show” (Line 5) where he hopes “the fifes will play Yankee Doodle” (Line 6). The speaker believes that what is actually on display is the federal government’s corrupt abuse of power and the complicity of Boston authorities. The poem rejects what Whitman saw as the crushing of Burns’s liberty, a situation the speaker compares to the oppression of white American colonists by British monarch George III. Thus, the speaker argues, taking the king’s remains from his coffin and marching them through the city as though the crown were still in charge would accurately mirror the present oppression of Massachusetts.  

The phantom revolutionary soldiers also view the Fugitive Slave Law and the federal power deployed to arrest Anthony Burns as a violation of the republican ideals for which they died. They appear to be ready to fight, but the narrator ruefully jokes that their beliefs are out of place now, since neither the populace nor the living soldiers share them: “Here gape your smart grandsons . . . . their wives gaze at them from the windows” (Line 21). The impotent revolutionaries, who have been reduced to “old limpers” (Line 25), might as well depart—this is no longer their time.