Eric the Blue

In Civil War times, before we commemorated Memorial Day, Walt Whitman, author of the self-published book of poems now known as Leaves of Grass, traveled to northern Virginia upon hearing that his brother George, a soldier in the Union army, had been wounded and was convalescing there. He found George, whose wounds were slight, but he was so affected by what he saw in the makeshift soldiers’ hospitals around D.C. that he pulled up stakes, moved to the District, and took a part-time job in the federal bureaucracy in order to bankroll his primary activity: working in the hospitals as a volunteer nurse practitioner. He talked to the sick and dying men, took down their dictated letters and made sure they were mailed, brought them gifts, often tobacco or fruit, read to them, changed their dressings, and generally made himself useful. Many anonymous deceased soldiers never knew that their last comforter is now regarded as one of America’s greatest poets. In old age, after he’d suffered a stroke, Whitman wrote the prose memoir called Specimen Days in which he recalls those days. He sometimes pastes in journal entries he’d made at the time, and reading it is often, in an understated sort of way, quite a lacerating experience:

May, ’63. As I write this, the wounded have begun to arrive from Hooker’s command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first arrivals. The men in charge told me the bad cases were yet to come. If that is so I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought to see the scene of the wounded arriviof Gng here at the landing at the foot of Sixth street, at night. Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain’d a long and violent shower. The pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any rate they were exposed to it The few torches light up the spectacle. All around–on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places–the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c, with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also–only a few hard-work’d transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call’d to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be suppress’d, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance. To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next day more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day.

During his life, Whitman continually revised and enlarged Leaves of Grass. His Civil War poems are in the relatively late section called “Drum Taps” and, according to an editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “are, with the pictures of Winslow Homer and the photographs of Matthew Brady, among the most precious records of the American Civil War.” Many are kind of long, and I’m too lazy to transcribe another long quotation, but here’s one of the drum taps, just four lines long, entitled “Look Down Fair Moon”:

Look down fair Moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.