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Walt Whitman

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Originally aired on December 27, 1996 - In part 122 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the life and career of Walt Whitman. Though he was, Robertson says, the most famous male nurse in the Civil War, his writings about the conflict have the greater fame.

#122 – The Poet/Nurse (Walt Whitman)

Had you walked the streets of Washington in the last half of the Civil War, you likely would have encountered a strange but fascinating man. His scarlet face, bushy beard, and wide-brimmed sombrero gave him the robust appearance of a Southern planter. Stout, slow-moving, with heavy-lidded eyes, he seemed much older than his early forties. His garments were coarse but carefully selected. He never wore a tie, but his open-collared shirts were spotless. Indeed, he always looked as if he had just taken a bath.

He was a clerk in the paymaster’s office, but he was far better known in other endeavors. His name was Walt Whitman.

Born on a New York farm in 1819, Whitman spent his early years in the newspaper business while developing an extraordinary flair for poetry. In December, 1862, he sped to Washington in search of his brother, a Union soldier wounded at Fredericksburg. While becoming assured that the sibling was out of danger, Whitman enjoyed visiting military hospitals and comforting hundreds of ill soldiers.

He wrote letters to family, friends, and newspaper editors about his hospital work. Soon money began to come in a steady stream. Whitman bought fruit, candy, writing materials, toiletries, and other gifts. When necessary, he devoted hours to nursing men in pan and despair. His efforts made him the most famous male nurse in the Civil War. Yet his writings have the greater fame.

“The real war will never get into the books,” Whitman sighed. He was wrong because he himself did so much with his pen to show the human drama and emotion of that conflict. During the war years, Whitman added new lines to his epic poem, Leaves of Grass. His narratives included Memoranda during the War, Specimen Days, and The Wound Dresser. The assassination of President Lincoln ultimately led to the two most famous of his poems, When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom’d and these still-moving lines from O Captain! My Captain!:

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult O shores and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

A stroke paralyzed Whitman for the last nineteen years of his life, but at his death in 1892 a nation remembered and paid him honor.

All but lost, among Whitman’s Civil War compositions is this free-verse poem, written while he was serving at a front-line hospital near the Chancellorsville battlefield.

A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early helpless.

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

 

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

 

Then to the second I step – and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

 

Then to the third – a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you – I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and diving and brother of all, and here again he lies.