Twelve Stone, Naked

A Poetry Tale about Walt Whitman, told by Hello Doggo.

In February eighteen seventy-two, a young Dublin civil servant wrote a letter to Walt Whitman. Then he didn’t send it. For four years.

His name was Bram Stoker.

He sent it at last, with a fresh note dated Valentine’s Day eighteen seventy-six. It began: If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask you to put it into the fire without reading any farther.

He described himself: six feet two inches high, and twelve stone weight naked.

Naked. To a man he had never met.

And then the line people still blush at. How sweet a thing it is, he wrote, for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes, father, and brother and wife to his soul.

From Camden, New Jersey, Whitman wrote back within weeks. You did well, he said, to write to me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately too.

They met at last in eighteen eighty-four.

Then came Dracula. Some critics see Whitman in the Count: the height, the strength, the long white hair, the heavy moustache. Others point to Stoker’s employer, the actor Henry Irving. Nobody can prove it.

Whitman’s poem Miracles finds wonder in the strangers opposite me riding in the car. One stranger, at least, went on to invent the most famous stranger of all.