You laggards there on guard! look to your arms! In at the conquer'd doors they crowd! I am possess'd! Embody all presences outlaw'd or suffering, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain. For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch, It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night. Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side, (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.) Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced. Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp, My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat. Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them, I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.
Afterword
Thence to the pit… Whitman’s identification with convicts, cholera victims, and beggars recalls the example of Jesus, whose ministry to the poor and outcast riled the Jewish priesthood no less than the Roman imperial authorities. Indeed this section and the next may be read as glosses on the New Testament theme of kenosis, the emptying of the self to become a receptacle for God’s will. “O Christ! My fit is mastering me!” Whitman cries in the 1855 version, and then adopts in turn the personae of a rebel adjusting the noose around his neck, a defiant savage, a visitor to the tomb of George Washington, a boy recalling prison ships, a redcoat surrendering at Saratoga. “I become any presence or truth of humanity here,” he declares, “And see myself in prison shaped like any other man,/ And feel the dull unintermitted pain.”
The prison and the pain are all that remain in the deathbed edition—this is the same pain experienced by the wounded in the previous section—and if Whitman’s decision to excise the explicit Christian reference is understandable (his poem is intended to supersede all religious texts) it is nevertheless a pity that he abandoned his recollection of the bay, near his childhood home, where British prison ships moored during the Revolutionary War—rotting hulks in which more soldiers and sailors died of neglect than in all the battles of the war. “These become mine and me every one,” he wrote in the first edition, “and they are but little,/ I become as much more as I like.” If the Son of Man’s witness to lepers and prostitutes, the lowest of the low, shaped the thinking of this poet possessed of the forgotten and the lost, the tradition continues in the practice of the contemporary American writer and Zen priest Peter Matthiessen, who with his fellow adepts cares for the most neglected members of society, homeless men suffering from AIDS. This is what Whitman teaches us to do when he takes on the burden of the cholera patient: “away from me people retreat”—and yet they cannot go very far, because he will not let them out of his sight. Nor will his poem.
C.M.
Question
Today, many humanitarian-aid organizations use film of children suffering in famines or children with diseases and deformities that medical care could correct. Such ads try to make you identify with the suffering and pain of people distant from you so that you will support organizations that work to ease the starvation and suffering. Do these attempts to manufacture empathy work? What is the effect on our daily lives of being asked to identify with the pain and suffering of others? Does Whitman’s Section 37 offer a compelling record of the costs of taking on such pain and humiliation?