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This, at any rate, is how Whitman resolves the association between love and decay in the poetry. His central metaphor begins with the sympathetic self receiving the outer world (the world of objects or the lover) with both fear and delight, and then suffering a kind of death, the “chemistry of nature” that leads to the spring wheat, the new shoots, the grass over graves. But in life things are a little more complicated. For Whitman “in the game” the sequence begins with a sympathetic man admitting the soldiers to his heart, and feeling again the simultaneous attraction and risk: a “virus” saturates his system as he kisses them good-night. But here the plot may have to change, for is there a “chemistry of man” like the “chemistry of nature” which will assure the life of a lover who has allowed a foreign thing to penetrate his blood?

A curious anecdote will answer the question in the terms Whitman himself might have used. Whitman’s comrade after the war, Peter Doyle, suffered at one time from a skin eruption called “barber’s itch.” Whitman took him to a doctor for treatment. Writing soon thereafter, Whitman tells Doyle: “The extreme cases of that malady … are persons that have very deeply diseased blood, probably with syphilis in it, inherited from parentage, & confirmed by themselves—so they have no foundation to build on.” Both Whitman and Doyle had apparently worried that his rash might be a sign of syphilis. (The association between love and disease needed even less imagination in the days before penicillin. Whitman’s brother Jesse had contracted syphilis from a prostitute and was later to die in an asylum.) There was no obvious “diseased blood” in Whitman’s own parentage, but he felt it close by. And as vegetable life has the chemistry of compost, so, for Whitman, we humans may clean our animal blood through the chemistry of love: “My darling,” he wrote to Doyle, “if you are not well when I come back … we will live together, & devote ourselves altogether to the job of curing you …”

Here, however, as in Calamus, we come to a gap between desire and accomplishment. Whitman was not able to cleanse the blood—either his or Peter’s—in the fullness of a human love. He could not live out his affections in the form his fancy offered, and his illness dragged on—not, perhaps, the actual ailment that first broke his health but the more figurative “virus of the hospitals … which eludes ordinary treatment.” It became Whitman’s habit for the rest of his life to attribute frailty and disease to the “hospital poison absorbed in the system years ago.” His own imagination, that is, sensed he was not cured. During the war he had allowed himself to cease being the “superb calm character” imagined in his journal, “indifferent of whether his love and friendship are returned.” Instead, he took the risk and opened himself up. And the soldiers returned his love, but not on the terms he wanted. He was always “Dear Father” to them, never “My darling.” His illness, “tenacious, peculiar and somewhat baffling,” lingered on. Had he been born in a different land or a different era he might have found the way. But in the capital of the New World in the middle of the nineteenth century,

When I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was

with them,

How together through life, through dangers, odium,

unchanging, long and long,

Through youth and through middle and old age, how

unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,

Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with the

bitterest envy.

In January of 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke on the left side of his body which left him bedridden for months. As was by then his custom, he associated his failing strength with his wartime illness. “Had been simmering inside for six or seven years … Now a serious attack beyond all cure.” Four months later, just as he was beginning to be able to walk again, Whitman’s mother died, “the only staggering, staying blow