Hello, I'm Warren Perry, and I'm here in the
Portrait Gallery with Walt Whitman. Our portrait of Walt
was painted by John White Alexander in 1889.
Today, I want to read a couple of passages of recently published:
"Swift to My Wounded: Walt Whitman in the Civil War"
This play was written and adapted by me,
and it was produced by the National Portrait Gallery's Department of
Education in 2006 and 2007.
This play was just recently published. This is Walt Whitman summarizing his
experiences in Civil War.
"Of course, sometimes,
the worst thing about being Walt Whitman, are the memories of Walt Whitman.
Make no mistake: War is the worst thing in our world.
The memories are all recent, but they will stain and resonate
and last in my world in my mind until the day I die
if that day is a thousand years from now.
The idea of war is simple enough: fighting for a belief,
a principal, some land, maybe.
But war, war is a boy, an American boy with a life in front of him.
And he is strong and he is young and he is handsome. And he has a girl,
a beautiful American girl and he has plans for some land.
And he sees beauty in his life in front of him. He wants to build,
and he wants to grow, and his family and his church and his community are proud
of him
for his successes, and sad when he goes away to defend his country.
He looks like our fathers and our sons and our brothers and our husbands
and all the men we love. And then, there it is again:
Bang. And we've lost our husband,
our son, our brother, our father.
That is war. War is that box we put him in,
and the flowers we put on the ground he is under and, the grass
that grows with him feeding it with that skin we hugged and those bones
and muscles that held us. Those things with him they belong to the ground now,
not to us. That is war.
That, and worse.
Walt Whitman speaks of the
hospital in the patent office building. The patent office
is the greatest of the Washington buildings, certainly.
Yes, I will miss the columns,
I will miss the long, and classical corridors and the mighty pediments
rising above the walls.
I will miss its fortitude, its surety
I must not let the great hospital at the patent office pass away
without some mention. After Fredericksburg, the vast area
above the second story of this noblest Washington buildings
was crowded close with rows of sick,
badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large
apartments.
I went there many times. It was a strange,
solemn, and with all its features of suffering and death,
a sort of fascinating sight. I would go sometimes at night to soothe and relieve
particular cases. Two of the immediate apartments were filled with high and
ponderous glass case is crowded with models
in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine,
or invention it ever entered into the mind of man to conceive,
and with curiosities, and foreign presence.
Between these cases were lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide, and
quite deep.
And in these were placed the sick beside a great long
double row of them, up and down through the middle in the hall.
Many of them were very bad cases: wounds and amputations.
Then there was a gallery running above the hall
in which there were beds, also. It was indeed a curious scene,
especially at night when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying
there.
The gallery above and the marble pavement underfoot.
The suffering in the fortitude, to bear it in various degrees,
occasionally, from some, the groan that cannot be suppressed.
Sometimes a poor fellow dying with emaciated
face and glassy-eyed, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend,
no relative. Such are the sites, but lately,
in the patent office.