The death of the soldier continues to resonate in the hearts of those who
loved him. “The son does not die in any single instant—neither in the
hospital, nor in the hospital letter,” observes Robert Leigh Davis. “In-
stead he dies many times, and it is one of those deaths Whitman repre-
sents in the poem, his death to his mother.” And the false hope enter-
tained by the soldier’s sisters that he may still be alive only indicates that
they are trying to defer the shock they will feel when their brother’s death
is later con¤rmed.^46 The poet’s determination that the war’s deaths shall
forever reverberate in the memories and the hearts of the American people
is a major aspect of Drum-Taps.
Whitman did not mind conveying the impression, in Drum-Taps and in
later semiautobiographical writings, that as he moved through the hospi-
tal wards his presence and his touch had a curative ef¤cacy, claiming with
some satisfaction that his personal magnetism had revived many “faint &
lonesome” soldiers who had given up hope of physical recovery. “[T]hey
and I are too near each other,” he explained; “there is no time to lose, &
death and anguish dissipate ceremony here between my lads & me.” And
he observed with considerable pride that “the doctors tell me I supply
the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & pow-
ders are helpless to yield.”^47 The poetic distillation of his hospital labors
among the ailing and dying soldiers is “The Wound-Dresser.” The title
is itself something of a pun. It not only identi¤es the persona as one who
dresses the wounds of the hospitalized soldiers—and Whitman himself
remarked that “I have some cases where the patient is unwilling any-
one should do this but me”^48 —but it also casts him as a dresser of his
nation’s wounds, a pose he elaborated upon in his later writings about the
war. Whitman was in his mid-forties when he composed “The Wound-
Dresser,” but in order to achieve the needed artistic distance from which
to picture the war’s tragic scenes he introduced the poem’s persona as “an
old man” who relives his wartime service as a wound-dresser. A decade
after publishing the poem, Whitman transferred the original epigraph
to the Drum-Taps volume to the introductory stanza of “The Wound-
Dresser,” thereby fusing the images of the wartime persona and the living
poet who had dedicated his life and his poetry to his nation’s wounded.
(Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge
relentless war,180 / “Come Sweet Death!”