drumtaps

Is it fair to write Whitman off as merely bawdy?

If the highly explicit passages from Children of Adam and Calamus are noted, Whitman pulls no stops on shocking and exciting his readers with his revelations of the passion of lovers.  But Whitman makes an explicit reference to a higher purpose in From Pent-up Aching Rivers–not only does he sing the praises of the body, but he aims at a higher social purpose.

In the very beginning of the poem, Whitman states that sex is so consuming and essential to him that he will stand against social impropriety to proclaim it: “From what I am determin’d to make illustrious, even if I stand sole among men/From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus” (p. 248-9.)  The passion defines his identity, “from that if myself without which I were nothing” (248.)  The joyful union of two lovers is one of the greatest compelling forces behind Whitman’s verse that it is difficult to imagine what his poetry would look like without its drive.

The passage is full of a constantly changing dynamic of yield and command, possession and submission.  The master to the pilot, the general to his men–Whitman details lovemaking by connecting it to other examples of trust and companionship between men.  This opens up the privacy of the lovers’ tryst to a more general spectrum of respect and love, which in turn is fed back in to develop the lovers’ relationship.

Most touching of all, Whitman calls the body an “act-poem” wherein lovemaking is nature’s poetry, a harmony of two voices.  The act is divine, blessed and not shameful.  The “divine father” is the seed of many generations of great children, just as Adam is the root of all of mankind.  In the conclusion of the poem, we are directed to celebrate the act of union and the children that it produces.  While working to undo all the deep-seated religious and cultural taboos associated with sex, Whitman describes the act beautifully, praises its worth and creates from it a pure image of its divine origin and divine works.

Generation Y is very comfortable with its sense of individualism.

Nicknamed the ME, or millenium generation, each one of us has been taught to prize our own sense of self, often to the point of overindulgence.  Whitman is also a subscriber to individualism, but his poetry takes the concept far from its modern selfish bent.

Each of us is, in a sense, our own universe, encompassing a whole galaxy of senses and institutions.  Each world is unique, which means that each of us perceives everything around us differently.  Our common world is fractured into billions of singular variations, attuned to each man or woman’s view and experiences.

Although this may sound abstract, Whitman explains this individualism concretely in the latter part of Leaves of Grass (1855.) Not only are our legislative laws and world religions secondary to the great immortality and power of man, but even the laws of gravity and physics are subject to him.  Man is his own poem, and he holds a poetic power capable of god-like creation, as Whitman states, “leaves are not more shed out of trees or trees from the earth than they are shed out of you” (p.93.)

Without man, art, architecture, music, sculpture, would have no meaning.  History, politics and even civilization is dependent on the individual, and like the early sketches of the celestial bodies rotating around the earth, all of these institutions revolve around the individual.

We are not put on the earth by chance, Whitman claims, and we are not subject to fate or the rise and fall of fortune.  Divine powers do no exist to dwarf us or withdraw something essential from us at whim (92.)  The very fact that we exist on earth is heavy with significance.  Imagine a world with billions of souls, each capable of creating an entire universe to carry around with him through life and beyond death.

In the face of this great creative potential, in the powers we have with these universes in our pockets, the cohesiveness of the world seems to fall apart.  How is it possible that man can connect to his fellow man if what we experience is so different from person to person?  Would this not lead to certain isolation?  The concept of the mad writer trapped in his own head is not an uncommon figure in literature.  Is it still possible for us to get in touch with mankind?

Whitman assures us that these splinters of reality are drawn together with one look in the mirror:

Will the whole come back then?
Can we see the signs of the best by a look in the lookingglass?  Is there nothing greater or more?
Does all sit there with you and here with me? (p. 94.)

One look in the mirror shows us the perfect combination of the universe of our thoughts and experiences–we are met with the image of our own face.  Only we know the intricacies of the way we see the world, but everyone we meet is able to see our face: a highly condensed but nevertheless true symbol of our selves.

A male wood-duck or wood-drake

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and daylong ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
….I believe in those winged purposes,
And acknowledge the red yellow and white playing within me,
And consider the green and violet and the tufted crown intentional;

–Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855) p. 38

In the history of literature, birds often act as stand-ins for the figure of the poet. Whitman’s use of a wood-duck instead of a dove or raven marks an important choice for the tenor of his poem.

If a raven represents the mournful, misunderstood poet of Poe, Whitman’s wood-duck is the perfect representative for the liberated American.  Wood-ducks are present all over America’s lakes, rivers and wetlands, breeding in great numbers in Louisiana, Kentucky and the deep south.  Females and the general species are labeled wood-ducks, but the male of the species is nicknamed a wood-drake.  Whitman’s pair of male and female echoes the perfection of sexual union that he carries throughout the entirety of the poem.

Not only is the wood-duck important in its ubiquity, but the bright myriad of colors of the male’s plumage hearkens to the variety that exists in the American republic.  Whitman stresses that America encompasses men and women of many colors, all of which are equal under democratic rule.

Below is a caption from the Audubon Society’s website on the habit of wood-ducks:

On the ground the Wood Duck runs nimbly and with more grace than most other birds of its tribe. On reaching the shore of a pond or stream, it immediately shakes its tail sidewise, looks around, and proceeds in search of food. It moves on the larger branches of trees with the same apparent ease; and, while looking at thirty or forty of these birds perched on a single sycamore on the bank of a secluded bayou, I have conceived the sight as pleasing as any that I have ever enjoyed.

The closeness and apparent camaraderie of these birds lends them to occupy an ideal place in Whitman’s poetry–another symbol to break with European tradition and invent a distinctly American flavor to add to literary convention.

Cited Works

The Audubon Society.  The Wood Duck, Summer Duck.  http://www.audubon.org/bird/BoA/F39_G4g.html

In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet, song for life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou woudist surely die.)

–Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

Ever since my first class on Modern Poetry as an undergraduate at Boston University, I have been in love with the teeming passion of Whitman’s verse.  While the poet’s potent feeling and sexuality is obvious in Calamus and other such works, I found his sensuality particularly stirring in his war poetry, including his verses devoted to President Lincoln.

In When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, Whitman evokes the poetic figure–a thrush, an ordinary bird, rather than one of nobler stock (think of Keats’ nightingale.)  The thrush survives on its song, its poetic exuberance.  It lifts the narrator out of his ruminations of death and life to invite him to a higher plane.  The result, of course, is the poem itself, which brings Lincoln beyond death to a new form of life–poetic immortality.

All writers, myself included, can see themselves as the thrush: working in isolation, alone in one’s own thoughts.  Whitman’s elegy encompasses all of these elements in a style that is fresh and new, accessible to all, and full of life.