Many years later, Whitman wrote about the qualifications that Civil War nurses needed to possess, and here, too, he emphasizes the sense of touch, the need for an unrestrained and incessant physicality--a "laying on of hands" to engender both physical and emotional healing. This excerpt comes from Specimen Days (1882-3); all the emphases have been added.

Striking here is the way these ideal Nurses resemble the Poet who revives those who suffer and who resurrects the dying.

The poem begins by imagining the year as an object of the speaker's poetic attentions, but one requiring something different than the "dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses" a regular suitor might send. But then there is a shift, and the year itself is personified--anthropomorphized--in terms tied closely to assumptions about both gender and poetry. The year is "Not . . . some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas piano; / But as a strong man . . . carrying a rifle . . with a knife in the belt at your side." The lines emphasize gender conventionality, turning the poet into a lisping figure and opposing him to the manliness of the year as soldier.

So what precisely is to be done with the fact of the "male" Whitman serving as a nurse when he says women are more suited? That is, what are the gender issues raised by the fact of Whitman's service as a nurse in the Civil War? And how were conventions of gender affected more broadly by the massive mobilization of whole cultures, north and south, for Civil War?