Reading in a Haze

When I was a freshman in high school, I got mono (who didn't, right?) and was locked in my room for about three months with a high fever.  All I could do was read-- TV hurt my head, and this was before high school students had their own computers (I'm old).  So I read A LOT. And for some reason, I read things that are weird and upsetting even if your fever doesn't cause you to imagine you are a character in the story.  Because of this, I remember Wuthering Heights in a very real, physical way and I went through a very strange depression while reading the book.  It was like it took over my life-- like a waking dream or a haunting.  I still love the book, but I think my parents were unaware of how my reading was effecting me and how Gothic literature can seem to a feverish fourteen year old. Lets just say I can sympathize with the "brain fever" that so often plays a role in eighteenth and nineteenth century plots. 

I had a bit of a fever again recently, when we were choosing our articles on Barbary pirates, and this may have been why I was drawn to a poem entitled "Old and Young.: REUBEN JAMES" By William W. Gay. This poem appears in The Independent ... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, His... Jan 29, 1880.  This poem chronicles a battle between Barbary pirates off the coast of "Afric" (it even calls the pirates "Moslem"), and a famed seaman.  Though it is out of our date range, I chose it to get a later perspective on the Barbary Pirates, some "seventy years ago and more/ in our nation's early life," and because the imagery stayed with me in a very Wuthering Heights fever sort of way.  For one thing, the main character, Reuben James, seems to be completely crippled; in fact, his injuries seem to cover every part of his body mentioned.  I imagined him with an eye patch and two peg legs and two peg arms like the pirate on Family Guy. Also, I don't know if it the rhyme scheme or the fever, but the text seems much more graphic than I expected.  Maybe the rhyme makes the violent imagery seem jovial and thus shocking, or maybe this poem really is shockingly violent and gory, even to my modern, desensitized ears/eyes/imagination.  Either way, it is the type of poem that makes you feel as if you are standing on the deck of a ship, being splashed by blood, hearing the screams of the men fighting around you.  What I am curious about is how this poem has changed or reinterpreted the facts after seventy years or more, about the racial implications of the "Moslem" pirates, and about the focus on Reuben's crippled body and ability to fight.  Is he a martyr in a way?  And if so, what is he a martyr for?  Is he the ideal man? Disability criticism may have a field day with this one as well.