Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d
hair, and ®esh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you, my dear comrade?Then with a mingling of paternal/maternal affection and the “calamus”
love that pervades his feelings for all the “sweet boys” he befriended and
nursed, he removes the blanket from the second member of the trio, ex-
claiming piteously, “and who are you my child and darling? / Who are
you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?” And next to these two ¤gures
made holy in death lies the third soldier whose face, he thinks, resembles
that of the cruci¤ed god:
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 divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.In both “Song of Myself ” and “To Him Who Was Cruci¤ed” (1860) the
persona had imagined himself as Christ’s companion and con¤dant, but
here he beholds with astonishment, alongside the bodies of two dead
soldiers, the imagined incarnation of a soldier-Christ. The poem is a
stunning exercise in wartime myth making.
As a hospital volunteer Whitman wrote hundreds of letters for the dis-
abled and often half-illiterate soldiers. Many were written to inform
family members that a son or husband had died and that Whitman had
kept a watch at the bedside of their loved one. Thus, for example, he
wrote a letter “about the last days of your son” to the family of Erastus
Haskell of Company K, 141st New York Volunteers, whose physical de-
cline he had followed as the boy lay dying. “I am only a friend, visiting the
wounded and sick soldiers (not connected with any society—or State),”
he wrote to make clear that he was not employed by, or associated with,
the Christian Commission or any church or government agency. “Many
nights I sat in the hospital by his bedside till far into the night... the
lights would be put out—yet I would sit there silently, hours, late.... I
shall never forget these nights, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick
and wounded lying around in their cots, just visible in the dimness, & the
dear young man close at hand lying on what proved to be his death
178 / “Come Sweet Death!”