many of whom were on the verge of dying from their injuries or from the
consequences of poor medical practice. His letters to his mother and his
wartime dispatches to the New York press reveal how profoundly these
deaths affected him and how deeply involved he became in the soldiers’
struggles with death. They are ¤lled with wonderment at the calm and
fortitude that his “sons” displayed as they faced death. “Mother,” he wrote,
“you can have no idea how these sick & dying youngsters cling to a fel-
low, & how fascinating it is, with all its hospital surroundings of sadness
& scenes of repulsion & death.” Armory Square Hospital, where he vis-
ited frequently, he said, “contains by far the worst cases, most repulsive
wounds, has the most suffering & the most need of consolation.” The
doctors, who appreciated his efforts, he said, give him “room,” and “I am
let to take my own course.”^54 Dozens of these suffering and dying soldiers
are named in Whitman’s letters, in Memoranda During the War, and in
Specimen Days. For example, he records his interaction with a young New
York man, wounded in the knee and dying of diarrhea and blood poison-
ing, who asked him to read a passage from the New Testament about
Christ’s cruci¤xion and resurrection: “He ask’d me if I enjoy religion. I
said, ‘Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean and yet, may-be, it is the
same thing.’ Oscar behaved ‘manly.’ The kiss I gave him as I was about
leaving he return’d four-fold.”^55 And yet, aside from brief allusions to the
nature of their wounds or their physical condition, the soldiers on the
persona’s tour of duty in “The Wound-Dresser” are never named and
never individualized. Nor does the persona interact with them; the an-
guish he feels is internalized. They appear only as so many suffering bod-
ies and faces whom the “walker”-persona attends, but this very ano-
nymity permits Whitman to represent them as examples of what he calls
the vast “army of the wounded.” The literary tactic of preserving the
soldiers’ anonymity, which Whitman uses throughout the Drum-Taps po-
ems, affords him the artistic control to make these scenes vivid and rep-
resentative of the suffering sustained by the ailing and dying soldiers he
observed or attended. And by portraying these almost generic inhabitants
of a nightmarish world, “The Wound-Dresser” can focus on the interior
drama of the saintly wound-dresser as he tends them—those with frac-
tures and festering wounds, the soldier with the amputated hand lying on
his pillow “with curv’d neck and side-falling head,” the soldier wounded
in his side who has only “a day or two more” to live and whose wasted
frame and “yellow-blue” countenance are symptomatic of the onset of
“Come Sweet Death!” / 183