`The Significant Word Unknown'

April 4, 1968, was a Thursday so my brother and I were watching Daniel Boone on NBC television. The title role was played by Fess Parker who in the previous decade had portrayed another rugged American hero, Davy Crockett. During the show, which came on at 7:30 p.m. in Cleveland, news broke that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been fatally shot in Memphis, Tenn., and the already savage year of 1968 was becoming unimaginably more savage.

While watching Daniel Boone I was reading the Signet paperback edition of Leaves of Grass, with a mild-looking Walt Whitman in pastels on the cover. I no longer remember which poem held my divided attention, though my favorite, one I reread compulsively in those years, was “Song of Myself.” In memory, that day 40 years ago remains an unlikely confluence of American heroes: Boone, Whitman, King.

The Internet Movie Database tells me the episode of Daniel Boone broadcast that night was titled “Faith’s Way.” “Faith” refers not to the virtue but to a character, Faith, played by Julie Harris, whose best-known role in subsequent decades was that of another American hero, Emily Dickinson, in The Belle of Amherst. Dickinson’s most productive period, 1861-1865, coincided with the Civil War, during which she wrote some 800 poems.

In his great prose work Specimen Days, Whitman returns obsessively to the Civil War, during which he served as a nurse in Union field hospitals, and Abraham Lincoln, whose assassination is the subject of Whitman’s greatest poem (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) and his worst and most popular (“O Captain! My Captain!”). A piece from Specimen Days, “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” consists of three long, stirring sentences, such as a preacher might deliver. Whitman writes:

“And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown.”

Whitman, the most tender of men, couldn’t bear the thought of so much anonymous death. In his notebooks he records the names, ranks, units and home towns of thousands of sick, wounded, dying men, much like Ernie Pyle in another war, though not as a journalist but a caregiver, a nurse, an angel of mercy. He also noted their wishes for small comforts and sought to fulfill them – jelly, oranges, newspapers, rice pudding, plugs of tobacco. In Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, Daniel Mark Epstein writes of the poet’s visits to the hospitals:

“Whitman wore a wine-colored suit with large pockets, his baggy pants tucked into his black morocco boots. With his rosy cheeks, white beard, and the leather haversack slung over his shoulder, it was no wonder the boys called him Santa Claus. According to Nellie O’Connor, one Yuletide Whitman was coming from the hospital when a suspicious policeman ordered him to `remove the false face!’ Walt showed him the face was really his own, but then asked the policeman, `Do we not all wear “false faces?”’ He was delighted to have been mistaken for St. Nick.”

Epstein adds:

“Above all it was the gift of his kind presence that the soldiers valued. He told his mother, `the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals, among the poor languishing & wounded boys, is that I am so large and well – indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair.”

On the inside cover of one notebook he signed himself “Walt Whitman Soldier’s Missionary to Hospital, Camp, & Battle Ground.”