Walt Whitman, dressed as a “rough” to meet Emerson’s ideal of the American poet, for the photo in the flyleaf of “Leaves of Grass.”
One of the poems that has been floating in and out of my head over the past few weeks is Walt Whitman’s part 6 of “Song of Myself,” the multipart poem at the center of his one and only book, Leaves of Grass.
I have taught this poem many, many times, to literature and creative writing students. It is really my favorite example in a lesson about “when American poetry truly began,” a two-part talk that show how Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, with their eccentricity and, in Walt’s case, quite deliberate craft, created an American poetics one can follow to this day, a real break with British tradition not just in subject matter but also in form.
Walt uses words with Anglo Saxon roots, avoiding Latinate and Romantic words. He uses the poetic devices of the King James Bible: catalog, litany, long rolling lines, over the iambic pentameter of, say, Shakespeare. His poetics are an answer to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” in which he called for a poet able to sing America’s landscape and people. He writes:
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chant our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. … Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
“Song of Myself” is a direct answer to this call, and part 6, in which a child comes to Whitman clutching a handful of grass and asks him “What is the grass?” and Whitman summons all his imaginative powers to answer, is maybe the best first step toward Emerson.
Whitman reels off a series of long metaphors for the child, comparing the grass to his own hopeful mood [me], a monogrammed handkerchief dropped by God (like a flirtatious woman) to make us look up and ask who it belongs to [God], “the babe of the vegetation” [you], or “a hieroglyphic” representing the broad democratic nature of America herself [America].
And then he says: And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
That will give you pause. And he unwinds this metaphor over a few stanzas, quite literally, saying it grows from the white heads of old mothers and beards of old men and from under the roofs of mouths. Of dead and buried people. It’s fun to teach this with school children, because they kind of can’t believe how gross it is!
Walt is ever the optimist, but in this poem, his extreme conclusion has always made me uneasy. I can go on enjoying and laughing with the poem and indulging him, but I never nod my head at the conclusion. He writes at the end,
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
Whitman embraced not just Emerson’s poetics but his Transcendentalism, too. Everything goes to the earth and comes out of the earth, not a molecule is lost, and we are all made of the same economy of atoms. I live in you and you in me and it is all good.
Naah. I can’t go with him. I do think to die is different from what anyone supposed. But I think the loss of each individual person and his or her gifts is a tear (in both homonym senses of a tear cried and a tear in the fabric), in no way lucky or to be praised.
I received three postcards today from a friend who lives in Dubai, (a wonderful letter idea!) and on one were some lines from Rumi:
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter
We have fallen into the place where everything is music
And even if the whole world’s harp should burn up,
There will still be instruments playing.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
I do think that the afterlife will be something akin to music, and light, participation in a pure way with the Divine. Communion with God, who I have encountered as Christ. I know it is Holy Week, and I am with my community affirming the bodily resurrection. For me the key moment in the whole Crucifixion is when the temple veil is rent in two. That is by far the richest image for me in the whole event. As a Christian, what Jesus’ death does is rip the veil between both worlds in two, rend it.
Right now my understanding of what happens in that moment and forever afterward, of glory, is closer to music and light. That brings me comfort. Even joy.