The Compassionate Poet

By Trevor Stammers

The Compassionate Poet

 

Walt Whitman immediately stands out for me as being the poet of compassion.
 
‘My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth’, he wrote in his first published and most famous work Leaves of Grass. By the time Whitman wrote The Wound Dresser however he had nursed hundreds of dying casualties in the American Civil War. In my talk, I read from the end of section 2 to the end of the poem (text on the accompanying ppt) and shared some general reflections on the poem before looking specifically as a doctor at Whitman’s bracketed text.
 
These parentheses which frequently punctuate the poem, far from containing merely tangential thoughts, reveal the poet’s heart as he goes about his tending of the wounded. So often doctors are encouraged to be both detached and dispassionate but there has to be a touching place where our inner feelings about our outward circumstances can be expressed. I therefore focused on these outbursts from the wound dresser’s soul to see what vision of the good they might point towards.
 
‘On, on I go’ or the like is repeated several times in the poem. Ian McGuire suggests that ‘(Open doors of time! Open hospital doors!)’ is “where the urge towards an eternal beyond temporal differentiation is matched by an insistence on earthly time as an experience of decay and suffering.”  The doors of eternity though which there will be ‘no more sorrow and no more pain’ are the frame through which the horrors seen through the hospital doors are able not only to be endured but embraced literally as well as metaphorically.
 
The second parenthesis is ambivalent – is it a plea for the patient not to tear the bandage away or a plea to himself not to lose his own sanity in the midst of such a hell?
 
In the third parenthesis of section three we see not only an acceptance of death but a vision of it being both a sweet and beautiful release and a mercy - yet there is no suggestion of his bringing death about but rather he utters a prayer for death to come. He sits ‘by the restless all the dark night’ (italics mine) – however long it takes.
 
The final parenthesis of section 3 has been the source of much speculation. Some have suggested that ‘the fire a burning flame’ is the anger that Whitman feels against the injustice and senselessness of war, yet the context of the rest of the poem does not really support this. Earlier in the poem he goes out of this way to not impute blame to either side of the conflict and pity and love, endurance and faithfulness from the immediate surrounding emotional context here. Surely the ‘burning flame’ the flame of compassion burning within that enables the professional impassivity to dress the wound and to go on and on doing so?
 
I concluded the talk by reading ‘On Reading Walt Whitman’s The Wound Dresser’ by Jack Coulihan, a contemporary US physician poet whose thoughts make use of differing elements of Whitman’s text and illustrate further ways in which the poem can speak to us about the meaning of compassion.
 
Relevant publications
Stammers T  2014 Poems in Practice  British Journal of General Practice  64 (619) 93
Stammers T 2014 Well-versed in Medicine:  ‘Tools of the Trade- Poems for New Doctors  British Journal of General Practice  2014 64 (628): 586-587.

Trevor Stammers - Poetry

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