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By Root 866 0

the first time in his life, troubled with headaches and fainting spells. It was never clear what ailed him; by his own account, one doctor told him he had been “saturated with the virus of the hospitals,” another that he had “too deeply imbibed poison into [his] system,” and another that he had “been penetrated by the malaria.”* Whitman had been bold and incautious in his nursing, going among smallpox victims and deliberately tending the worst fevers and wounds (“I go—nobody else goes”). When he himself began to weaken, he considered leaving the work, but soon realized that it was too important to him. As he wrote to his mother, “It is now beginning to tell a little upon me, so many bad wounds, many putrified … but as it is I shall certainly remain here… it is impossible for me to abstain from going to see & minister to certain cases, & that draws me into others, & so on …”

There is no reason to doubt that Whitman was physically sick, but I think we may take his illness as a fact of the psyche as well. It seems clear that the emotional weight of Whitman’s years of nursing lay in the contact with the soldiers. He chanced upon a form for the dedication of his manly tenderness and, having found it, allowed it to absorb him completely, giving himself away and receiving affection in return. But then: sickness. To generalize his dilemma and put it boldly we might say: affection decays identity. The ego-of-one is willingly wounded in love, broken so as to receive the beloved. In the soldier’s wounds, and in their putrefaction, the ego sees itself, and its fear, reflected. Once the self has abandoned its protective armor, will the lover come to fill the empty place, or will the wound just fester? Whitman’s claims to healing the sick with his personal magnetism belong alongside his talismanic sentence “I know my body shall decay”; for, confined inside the knowledge of that decay, the poet of “Song of Myself” had chosen the decay of giving himself away, the Osiris-decay in which with mingled fear and attraction he allowed himself to be drawn into a dismemberment that bears new life as its first fruit.

A prewar poem, “This Compost” (the poem I earlier associated with the Osiris etching), rehearses the drama of Whitman’s hospital work in every detail except, perhaps, the last. The poem opens with a man who hesitates to give himself to love:

I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my

lover the sea,

I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh

to renew me.

He senses the threat of disease. How, he asks, can he press his flesh to the earth, “Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within [it]? / Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?” Whitman resolves the fear in his usual manner, through an invocation of “the resurrection of the wheat.” Nature transforms the putrid:

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs

bloom in the dooryards,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above

all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!

That the winds are really not infectious,

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the

sea which is so amorous after me,

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over

with its tongues,

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have

deposited themselves in it, …

The list ends with a striking image for the poet of grass:

What chemistry! …

That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any

disease,

Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what

was once a catching disease.

New love is cautious because it is vulnerable. There is a dark side to nature; the green Osiris has a brother, Set, who rules the desert. If we open ourselves to love, will love come in return, or poison? Will new identity appear, or the dead-end death that leaves a restless soul? In the poem, at least, Whitman resolves his hesitancy by fixing his eye on the give-and-take of vegetable life in which the earth “grows