with acts of remembrance. At its beginning the now elderly persona—
intent on making sure that the war’s sacri¤ces are not erased by the pass-
ing of time—tells young children who have no active memory of the war
of the nation’s sacri¤ce and of his own. The poem’s ending establishes
the persona’s destiny (and that of Whitman himself ) to relive the bitter-
sweet experiences of the wound-dresser and to keep alive the memory of
those agonizing days. As M. Wynn Thomas says, Whitman remained
“preoccupied with the problem of providing an appropriate personal and
emotional memory out of the war.”^59 In an impressive display of pathos,
the poem comes full circle by merging Whitman’s personal recollec-
tions of the hospitals with the agonizing thoughts of the poem’s walker-
persona. The lines show the persona forever fated to relive the hospital
scenes in an everlasting present, and they enshrine the image of a healer-
persona whose “soothing hand” has comforted the sick and whose pres-
ence has calmed the dying.
Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d
and rested,
Many a soldiers kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)2
The venerable establishment poets—Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and
Bryant—wrote movingly about the war, but they were not witnesses to
its carnage. Herman Melville, who did visit the Army of the Potomac in
order to observe the suffering of the soldiers at ¤rst hand, highlighted the
ironies of battle and fate in his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866).^60
But as one who was saturated in the war’s spirit of carnage and death, of
hysteria and elation, Whitman felt that he alone had emerged as the war’s
authentic poet. Thus in “Spirit Whose Work Is Done” he beseeches his
wartime Muse—the “spirit of the hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but
pale as death next day”—to infuse him with her electric “currents,” which
will authenticate his words as those of the war’s poet:
“Come Sweet Death!” / 185