When Walter Met Peter

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 251 - When Whitman Met Peter - this episode deals with an essential area of Walt Whitman’s life and creative spirit - in fact, you might even say that a twenty-something immigrant served as an inspiration and a muse for some of the poet’s greatest works.  Of course, during Pride Month, this podcast concentrates on  America’s poet - but today I want to look at a young man that Whitman deeply loved - a basically humble immigrant who became caught-up in some of America’s most creative expressions, and someone who has been referred to as the love of Whitman's life. 

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 251 - When Whitman Met Peter - this episode deals with an essential area of Walt Whitman’s life and creative spirit - in fact, you might even say that a twenty-something immigrant served as an inspiration and a muse for some of the poet’s greatest works.  Of course, during Pride Month, this podcast concentrates on  America’s poet - but today I want to look at a young man that Whitman deeply loved - a basically humble immigrant who became caught-up in some of America’s most creative expressions - keep on listening, and I think you will see what I mean.

Most scholars believe that Peter George Doyle Jr. was born in early June 1843 in Ireland to Peter George Doyle Sr., a blacksmith, and Catherine Nash Doyle, the sixth of nine children. He was baptized on June 16, 1843, in Limerick - yes - there is a place called Limerick.  He later moved with members of his family across the ocean to Alexandria, Virginia, and then Baltimore. traveling through Baltimore which they reached on May 10.  Apparently to safely weather thru before reaching the shore of the United States.  Oh, remember the reference to a captain guiding his ship through a storm.

Now somewhere between 1856 and 1859 the Doyles moved to Richmond, Virginia. When the American Civil War broke out, Doyle enlisted in the Confederate States Army. He fought in several engagements of the war, including the Battle of Antietam, where he was wounded and was discharged on November 7, 1862. He likely re-joined the army for a time in 1863 before deserting and fleeing the North, where he was placed in a prison near Old Capitol Prison in April 1863. He was released on May 11 and began working at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.. After the war ended, he lived in Washington, D.C., and began working as a streetcar conductor for the Washington and Georgetown Railroad Company.

And that streetcar was the scene of the occasion when the writer, Walt Whitman, met the streetcar conductor, Peter Doyle.

You see, Doyle drove that streetcar, and one night, Doyle met Whitman as a result of his job. Whitman was a passenger, and by the end of the ride, it became apparent that Whitman was the only passenger still on Doyle's streetcar. The two began talking and almost instantly felt an attraction.  They became very close friends, corresponding regularly and frequently meeting. Whitman often rode Doyle's streetcar, they went on numerous hikes together, and the two wrote many letters. Whitman would address Doyle as "boy" or "son", while Doyle signed his name as "Pete the Great”.

If opposites attract, then Doyle and Whitman were quite a pair - Doyle had fought for the South during the Civil War, was relatively small, and uneducated.  Whitman had been a nurse for the North during the Civil War, was huge in size, and brilliant. And there was an age difference of 23 years.  But their relationship was quite intense.

The  poem Beat! Beat! Drums came out of Whitman’s experiences as a nurse during the Civil War.



Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a force of ruthless men,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;
Into the school where the scholar is studying:
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride;
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his grain;
So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking, And the yellow-blue countenance see.
I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.
I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)

But in many other ways, Whitman and Doyle were cut from the same cloth. Despite his white-collar occupations of journalist and government clerk, Whitman was at heart "one of the roughs." He felt most at home with the workingman that Doyle represented. For a time, Whitman had even taken up the carpenter's craft that his father taught to Walt and the other Whitman boys. Whitman's brother, Andrew, worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, just as Doyle worked at its Washington counterpart. Whitman could identify with Doyle's emotional and financial responsibilities to a widowed mother and dependent siblings. Whitman was shouldering similar obligations himself. It is likely that Doyle's large, extended family served as a surrogate to Whitman’s own family - located in distant New England at the time.

Now, Doyle was an eyewitness to an American tragedy that was to have
special significance to Whitman as poet and patriot. On Good Friday, April 14, of 1865, it was announced that President Lincoln would be attending Ford’s Theatre that night.  Doyle became excited at the news, and was able to obtain tickets for the performance that Lincoln would attend.  So Peter Doyle was actually present at the performance of “Our American Cousin" in Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865. Doyle described the evening's events:

I heard that the President and his wife would be present and made up my mind to go. There was a great crowd in the building. I got into the second gallery. There was nothing extraordinary in the performance. I saw everything on the stage and was in a good position to see the President's box. I heard the pistol shot. I had no idea what it was, what it meant—it was sort of muffled. I really knew nothing of what had occurred until Mrs. Lincoln leaned out of the box and cried, "The President is shot!" I needn't tell you what I felt then, or saw. I saw John Wilkes Booth on the cushion of the box, saw him jump over, saw him catch his foot, which turned, and saw him fall on the stage. He got up on his feet, cried out something which I could not hear for the hub-hub and disappeared. I suppose I lingered almost to the last person. A soldier came into the gallery, saw me still there, called to me: "Get out of here! we're going to burn this damned building down!" I said: "If that is so, I'll get out!”

Doyle claimed that Whitman later made use of Pete's eyewitness account for the poet's Lincoln sketches (in Memoranda During the War, Specimen Days, and various lectures). It is interesting to speculate in what other ways Doyle may have influenced Whitman's work. Was Pete the muse for Whitman's most popular Lincoln tribute, the poem, "O Captain! My Captain!"? Now the poem presents Lincoln as a ship's master, who dies just as the craft he piloted safely through a storm arrives at harbor. In developing this poem, Whitman may have sought to impress Doyle, by making the Irish immigrant's own sea journey to America the central image of this heroic elegy to Lincoln.  It turned out that when Doyle came to the United States across the Atlantic, there was an intense storm where the captain was able to steer the ship to safety.  And that storm also occurred on a Good Friday.  Both the president's assassination and Doyle's near wreck at sea occurred on a Good Friday. Whitman may also have broken from his own poetical tradition and adopted rhyme to make the poem more appealing to Doyle - who would have preferred limericks to Whitman’s flowing style of writing. I think it is Interesting that Whitman's first draft of "O Captain!" is not rhymed, but rather written in free verse.

Whatever its source or style, O Captain! My Captain! has become one of the most well-known of all America poems -

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;                     
But O heart! heart! heart!
                          O the bleeding drops of red,
                           Where on the deck my Captain lies,
                           Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
                         Here Captain! dear father!
                            This arm beneath your head!
                               It is some dream that on the deck,
                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
                            But I with mournful tread,
                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,
                                  Fallen cold and dead.



While definitely one of  Whitman’s most famous works, most scholars believe My Captain is not a very good example of the majority of Whitman’s poems. According to Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading by Kenneth Koch, Walt Whitman differed from the American poets who had written before him because most of his poems were non-metrical. He brought into poetry the heightened prose of nineteeth-century political orators and preachers, an Abraham Lincoln, and even the King James translation of the Bible.  Instead of a regular rhyming scheme, Whitman wrote like the common man spoke but in a slightly elevated sense.

Whitman seldom wrote works when he gave proper names to the characters, but in his Come Up from the Fields, Father” he does name his unseen hero - and calls him Pete - could this be a reference to Peter Doyle and an indirect reference to youth in general?

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in   the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

Like all relationships, the relationship between Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle had its ups and downs, but there is no question that is was not sincere.  On August 21,, 1869, Whitman wrote the following to Peter Doyle concerning the writer’s health, Doyle,s welfare, and their hopes for the future.  I’d like to read from that moving letter -

Brooklyn, NY

I have been very sick the last three days—I don't know what to call it—it makes me prostrated and deadly weak, and little use of my limbs. I have thought of you, my darling boy, very much of the time.
I have not been out of the house since the first day after my arrival. I had a pleasant journey through on the cars Wednesday afternoon and night—felt quite well then. My mother and folks are well. We are in our new house—we occupy part and rent out part. I have a nice room, where I now sit writing this. It is the latter part of the afternoon. I feel better the last hour or so. It has been extremely hot here the last two days—I see it has been so in Washington too. I hope I shall get out soon—I hanker to get out doors, and down the bay.

And now dear Pete for yourself. How is it with you, dearest boy—and is there anything different with the face? Dear Pete, you must forgive me for being so cold the last day and evening. I was unspeakably shocked and repelled from you by that talk and proposition of yours—you know what—there by the fountain. It seemed indeed to me, (for I will talk out plain to you, dearest comrade) that the one I loved, and who had always been so manly and sensible, was gone, and a fool and intentional suicide stood in his place. I spoke so sternly and cutting. (Though I see now that my words might have appeared to have a certain other meaning, which I didn't dream of—insulting to you, never for one moment in my thoughts.)
But I will say no more of this—for I know such thoughts must have come when you was not yourself but in a moment of derangement,—and have passed away like a bad dream. Dearest boy I have not a doubt but you will get well and entirely well—and we will one day look back on these drawbacks and sufferings as things long past. The extreme cases of that malady, (as I told you before) are persons that have very deeply diseased blood so they have no foundation to build on—but you are of healthy stock, with a sound constitution and good blood—and I know it is impossible for it to continue long.
My darling, if you are not well when I come back I will get a good room or two in some quiet place, and we will live together and devote ourselves altogether to the job of curing you, and making you stronger and healthier than ever. I have had this in my mind before but never broached it to you. I could go on with my work in the Attorney General's office just the same—and we would see that your mother should have a small sum every week to keep the pot a-boiling at home.

Dear comrade, I think of you very often. My love for you is indestructible.

I’d like to end this podcast episode when some remarks that Peter Doyle made about Walt Whitman years after the writer’s death - and his words about Walt will ring true to anyone who has ever been in love.

I have Walt's cloak here. I now and then put it on, lay down, and think I am in the old times. Then he is with me again. It's the only thing I kept amongst many old things. When I get it on and stretch out on the old sofa I am very well contented. It is like Aladdin's lamp. I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always near by. When I am in trouble—in a crisis—I ask myself, "What would Walt have done under these circumstances?" and whatever I decide Walt would have done - that I do.”

Join Celebrate Poe for episode 252 - Call Me By Your Name or Was Dracula Really Whitman

Sources include: Pete the Great: A Biography of Peter Doyle, American Presidents Attend the Theater by Thomas A. Bogar, What is the Grass by Mark Doty, Same-Sex Couples: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples by Rodger Streitmatter, and or course, the Complete Works of Walt Whitman.
 
Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.