These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)
—Walt Whitman, The Wound-Dresser
In 1914, the painter Albert Chevallier Tayler
was renowned as much for his detailed interiors
as for his mastery of the human figure.
In his Ignatius Convalesces at Loyola—second in
a series, after Ignatius Is Wounded at the Battle
of Pamplona—the soldier-saint convalesces in
a paneled chamber below a diamond-paned
window, his back against luxuriant pillows,
his leg meticulously wrapped to the splint.
Draped over the knees, a length of fabric
too diaphanous to be of practical use.
At the bedside, a crystal carafe and glass,
the wine already poured. In the foreground,
on a low table, an exquisite slice of golden
melon, the china plate thin as a shadow.
* * *
In a detail of this painting—illustrating
an essay on the conversion of Ignatius—
the eye is drawn to the saint in profile,
his hand gripping a book, his gaze lifted
to what I cannot see across the room. I study
the fabrics: how the collar and sleeves of
his loose smock are embroidered in threads
the color of pewter, and how the sheet falls
crisp and straight, like a linen altar cloth
someone has ironed and draped with
reverent formality. Just as Saul was thrown
down by blindness and there converted,
here, too, Ignatius is catastrophically
impaired—by war. A cannonball has crushed
his leg, ending his glorious career.
* * *
I return to Tayler’s Battle of Pamplona.
Ignatius has just fallen: fashionable armor,
fussy plumed helmet, the sword still held high,
but the eyes telling of pain. An attendant
is dressing the leg wound. In the background,
barely visible in the sulfurous haze of battle,
another soldier has fallen onto his back,
one leg thrown up against the breached wall,
the open hand extended on the dirt, lifeless.
* * *
I was once attendant on a ward where
the wounded kept arriving on medevacs
out of Vietnam. I was once steady of hand,
as impassive before the agony as Whitman
tried to be, while making his rounds on
the horrific wards of the Civil War.
Never mind conversion, I have seen
what it takes to convalesce after war—
to secure the shattered body in place,
to splint the self of a piece, despite fever
and pain, deformity and survivor-guilt.
In 1914, Albert Chevallier Tayler painted
a fitting sick room for Ignatius, as though
it were all ordained, sacramental, holy.
What Tayler could not have foreseen:
the Great War to come, his own sons—
soldiers, both of them—killed. How to fix
such suffering ever, in words or in paint?
