Whitman participated: “For a few moments his face wore an expression
that she had never seen before—he seemed rapt, absorbed... he ap-
peared like a man in a trance.”^17
In an era characterized by a shorter life expectancy and a high inci-
dence of child mortality, journalist Whitman inveighed against Brook-
lyn’s life-threatening health conditions—the foul dwellings of the poor,
crude health practices, deplorable sanitation, contaminated water, and
what he called “swill milk.” These circumstances were periodically wors-
ened by devastating epidemics of cholera and other lethal diseases; during
some of these trying times young Walter appears to have visited the
af®icted and dying poor, many of them immigrants. He was also drawn
to the city ¤remen and the drivers of the horse-drawn omnibuses on New
York’s Broadway, among whom the incidence of injury and death was
very high—drawn perhaps by their rugged individuality, by their sexual
masculinity, and by a sort of “motherly” compassion that a number of his
acquaintances attributed to him.^18 These same motivations later spurred
his visits to the wounded soldiers in New York hospitals at the outbreak
of the Civil War and his heroic labors among the hundreds of injured and
dying soldiers of Washington’s camps and hospitals. To some degree,
however, this compassionate conduct was linked to his attraction to suf-
fering and violent death, evidence of which appears in passages of lumi-
nous poetry that are often associated with episodes of heroism or of vi-
carious suffering.
Joseph Jay Rubin observes that although young Whitman lived amid
a “vibrant” Long Island milieu, “he chose at ¤rst to sing of stricken youth
rather than of farm kitchens, headlands, morning glories, swimming, and
blue¤sh trolling” that would appear in some of his mature poems.^19 The
undistinguished tales and verses that young Whitman wrote mirror the
sentimentality and moralizing that characterized the popular press, but
they also provide clues to his brooding over death and to his abiding
fascination with death. Thus the protagonist in “Tomb Blossoms,” a tale
Walt may have composed while still in his teens, strikes the pose of a
romantic young “man of feeling” who yearns for a gentle death and who
praises the grave as a palliative for human suffering. In this sentimental
tale about a poor, aged widow whom the protagonist watches as she deco-
rates two adjacent graves because she does not know which of them con-
tains the remains of her late husband, the narrator utters this paean to the
grave:
14 / Introduction