Two poems by Walt Whitman

Portrait of Walt Whitman (1873)

Long before modern conversations about criminal justice reform, the great poet Walt Whitman challenged readers to look at the condemned from a different perspective.

In You Felons on Trial in Courts, Whitman identifies himself with the accused and convicted and asks why he isn't locked up with them. After all, he, like all of us, has committed his fair share of sins. So why do we segregate certain sinners from the rest of society? Circumstance? Luck? Severity of the crime? Karma? If we cannot answer this question, what exactly gives us the right to do so?

Christian doctrine holds that Jesus is one person with two natures, divine and human. In To Him That Was Crucified, Whitman addresses the lesser discussed and often overlooked human Jesus. The son of a carpenter from the poor backwater of Galilee, Jesus was born into a world where His people were under the occupation of a seemingly invincible foreign power. It was a world where might made right, where the strong dominated the weak. But Jesus refused to accept that world. Bursting at the seams with both compassion for every person and righteous anger at injustice, He defied the power structures of His day by declaring that all men are equal, and that brotherly cooperation and charity, not domination and submission, ought to be the mechanisms with which we structure society.

The human Jesus's story is universal. People of every country, of every faith, and in every time, have found themselves on the wrong end of power. As Jesus identified Himself with the persecuted, the poor, and the prisoner thousands of years ago, so have the persecuted, the poor, and the prisoners identified themselves with Jesus for thousands of years.

You Felons on Trial in Courts

YOU felons on trial in courts;

You convicts in prison-cells—you sentenced assassins,

chain'd and hand-cuff'd with iron;

Who am I, too, that I am not on trial, or in prison?

Me, ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not

chain'd with iron, or my ankles with iron?

You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs, or ob-

scene in your rooms,

Who am I, that I should call you more obscene than

myself?

O culpable!

I acknowledge—I exposé!

(O admirers! praise not me! compliment not me! you

make me wince,

I see what you do not—I know what you do not.)

Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch'd and choked;

Beneath this face that appears so impassive, hell's tides

continually run;

Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me;

I walk with delinquents with passionate love;

I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and

prostitutes myself,

And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I

deny myself?

To Him That Was Crucified

MY spirit to yours, dear brother;

Do not mind because many, sounding your name, do not understand you;

I do not sound your name, but I understand you, (there are others

also

I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute you, and to salute

those who are with you, before and since—and those to come

also,

That we all labor together, transmitting the same charge and

succession;

We few, equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times;

We, enclosers of all continents, all castes—allowers of all

theologies,

Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,

We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the

disputers, nor any thing that is asserted;

We hear the bawling and din—we are reach'd at by divisions,

jealousies, recriminations on every side,

They close peremptorily upon us, to surround us, my comrade,

Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and

down, till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the

diverse eras,

Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages

to come, may prove brethren and lovers, as we are.