On a day like today, who needs a poet?

On a day celebrating the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., I'm thinking of Walt Whitman, which seems an odd choice. Whitman died decades before King's birth and his ideas belonged to a different century; nevertheless, I told my American Lit Survey students that since we're discussing Whitman in class on Wednesday, they should spend a little time on MLK day to sit and read Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser."  

What can a poem about Whitman's Civil War experience possibly say about the ongoing struggle for civil rights?

Whitman didn't fight in the Civil War--too old--but his brother fought and was wounded at Fredericksburg. Whitman traveled to a field hospital to tend to his brother's wounds, but then he accompanied a trainload of soldiers to a hospital in Washington, D.C., where he spent the next three years volunteering as a nurse.

Given the state of medical science at the time, it was a messy and unpleasant business, one that seems profoundly out of place in a war poem. Early in "The Wound-Dresser," Whitman describes the young people clamoring for war stories, asking him to "be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth," to describe the "hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous" that led to Union victory. We've certainly had plenty of poetry extolling the glories of war, right on back to The Iliad, but Whitman had little experience of glory. 

Instead, he takes readers alongside as he moves through a hospital full of broken bodies, providing what small comfort he can. "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go," he writes:

To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.

No glory here--only blood and gore, wounds and refuse. In a poem full of pain, he won't allow readers to look away:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,
And has not yet look'd on it.

But the poet has looked on it, and not just the bloody stump but "the fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen"--how many wounds over three years of battles? And what kind of help could a poet possibly offer?

"The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, / I sit by the restless all the dark night," he writes, and sometimes, when nothing can be done, he wishes for the wounded the sweet succour of death.

He evokes the stench and mess of gangrenous flesh, the futility of so many promising lives lost, the human cost of fighting for a worthwhile principle. I tell my students that the image of the poet spreading comfort among the hospital beds provides an emblem for American authors after the Civil War. Who will mend the great bloody gash in the American psyche? Who will help suture the gaping divisions that continue to tear the nation apart? Whitman reminds us that equality does not arrive easily but often requires blood and sacrifice, and if we're not fit to fight, then the least we can do is tend wounds and bear witness.

Which is why, on a day like today, we still need nurses and wound-dressers, and we'll always need poets.