death from gangrene. To a soldier with a head wound, the persona mur-
murs internally, “poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,” thus illus-
trating Whitman’s observation that quite a few of the badly wounded and
infected soldiers became crazed by pain (in this era when the symptom-
atology of pain was poorly understood).^56 Still the ¤ctive wound-dresser
attends the helpless soldiers while suppressing any outward sign of his
own emotional distress:
I am ¤rm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
would save you.That last line internalizes the very words that mothers everywhere have
spoken to their ailing children. Whitman’s “feminine” side was noted by
several of his contemporaries. He told a friend in 1863, “I think some-
times to be a woman is greater than to be a man—is more eligible to
greatness, not the ostensible article, but the real one.” And the next year
the feminist prison reformer Eliza Farnham named Whitman as one of
the very few “great men of this feminine order of mind,” thus classing
him among the most advanced thinkers of the era.^57 No wonder that as
the walker-persona observes the agonizing death spasms of a soldier who
has been wounded in the neck, he utters this internalized prayer for
mercy to Mother Death:
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly!)Whitman confessed that the “lingering and extreme suffering from wounds
or sickness seem to me far worse than death in battle. I can honestly say
that the latter has no terrors for me, as far as I myself am concern’d.”
Observing that the human imagination tends to exaggerate the terror of
death, he testi¤ed that he had not encountered one instance in which a
dying soldier “met death with terror,” and he concluded that to the dying
death was generally “a welcome relief and release.”^58
“The Wound-Dresser” has an “envelope” structure. It begins and ends
184 / “Come Sweet Death!”