Critical Analysis Of The Wound Dresser By Walt Whitman

In Walt Whitman’s poem, â€Å"The Wound Dresser,† the moments expressed throughout take place during the Civil War and are experienced by an old, devoted wound-dresser. The poem begins with the wound dresser having to make a choice on whether he should tell a group of children what he went through â€Å"or silently watch the dead† (17). Through the poem, the narrator captures the internal struggles he faces when dealing with a numerous amount of wounded soldiers day by day while at the same time trying to do his job. It is when the narrator is having these inner struggles that the poem distinctively uses punctuation and diction to fully capture unforgotten flashes imbedded in the mind of the narrator. The strong use of diction is a lot more†¦show more content†¦As the poem progresses, the narrator continues to use certain terms that overall portray what he went through. Not only is diction rather key to the poem, but so is the use of punctuation. In ord er to have a distinction between what the Wound Dresser experiences and what he’s thinking, the use of parenthesis becomes key. In the stanza previously chosen, the old man uses the parenthesis to not only show what he is thinking, but in this case almost warn himself and the listeners mentally of the story he is about to tell. Because the narrator is thinking that those who are about to listen to his story need to be â€Å"of strong heart,† there’s a hint of how much of an emotional ride recalling these memories will be (17). Although, the wound dresser isn’t using the parenthesis as strongly in the third stanza to show his internal struggles, he does so a lot more in the rest of the poem, particularly in the seventh stanza, which shows what a typical day for the Wound Dresser is. At the end of the seventh stanza, the narrator uses the parenthesis to state, â€Å"(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.) It becomes apparent that the use of parenthesis is used as to show thoughts because the wound dresser wouldn’t particularly announce something welcoming death while attending various patients on the verge of dying. Furthermore, the use of the exclamation mark reflects how defeated the narrator is after