“Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!”
— Walt Whitman, Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861)
Context
Whitman wrote 'Beat! Beat! Drums!' in 1861, amid the patriotic surge that followed the firing on Fort Sumter and the Union rout at Bull Run; it was collected in his Civil War sequence Drum-Taps (1865). The poem orders a military band to force its way through every precinct of peacetime life — the church, the school, the marriage bed, the farm, the market, the courtroom — until no citizen can pretend the nation is not at war. Each of its three stanzas begins and ends by commanding the drums and bugles to sound louder still.
How the repetition works
Where Lear's 'Howl, howl, howl, howl!' is grief erupting involuntarily, Whitman's 'Beat! beat!' is its opposite — a deliberate, almost merciless command issued to instruments, conscripting sound itself as an agent of war. The doubled imperative is immediately answered by a second, 'blow! bugles! blow!', so the epizeuxis arrives in matched volleys that lay down the percussive marching cadence the entire poem is built on. The figure here is not the depiction of an emotion but an act of mobilization: repetition deployed to drown out and override every competing human voice — bridegroom, scholar, weeping mother — that the stanzas go on to name.