Walt Whitman

By all accounts lazy, save for the elevation to "unwilling to compromise" by our esteemed panel of anthology editors, I think Whitman was a thing worse: unwilling, period. I make this charge, because I feel certain he could have tended other responsibilities and yet been prolific and as good... although, not really enjoying him myself, I don't know if that is much a compliment.

Personally, his pantheism wasn't particularly surprising considering his unwillingness to eschew his own propensity towards homosexuality. That is merely an observation; don't read anything into it.

Song of Myself (SOM)
This poem perplexed me. Is it homage to pantheism? Is it a gigantic declaration of emancipation from God? Whatever the case, I found myself mostly disappointed. There's something unexquisite about an announced exploration of self. Something unsavory in the fanfare. But I suppose we all do it in our own way. Some are merely more covert. Or demure. Why it matters I can't say. But it does. At least to me.

The two most compelling passages of SOM have to do with grass (common ground, life and death and life again) and the somewhat erotic imagery of lonliness and want.

The first:

"Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their
mother's laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps."

Certainly none of us is "contain'd between hat and boots", least of all Whitman!

I fancied visions of Eleanor Rigby in the second set of verses:

"She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window...

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them..."

The desperation of lonliness, eroticism, the unaware picture going on daily in the minds of not just this one poor creature, but, at least at certain junctures, many, if not all, is manifest here.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Required reading: v.1-5

This grief-writing at first impressed me as dishonest in its reserve. But I knew it could not be. Great imagery, but once or twice removed from emotion. Something is missing. Clawmarks in wood, the soul's bleeding yawp, something I can not put my finger on... other than to wonder... another bit of writing by a male for males? Alas, I know there is a female Whitman fan who seeks my wooden eyes for her own set of clawmarks! (I apologize to you, dear lady. I don't have what it takes to appreciate double W.)



Even so, I found myself envisioning the hermit thrush whose warble you can hear here. That was at least enjoyable, even though I knew I should find something mournful in it. It ws indeed suitable for a sort of lonely, natural dirge.

Lincoln's Funeral Procession













A Noiseless Patient Spider
I was particularly grateful to W.W. for this poem as he saw fit to make it profoundly short! The first stanza seems to be literally about a spider whereas the second seems to be about W.W. trying to find his place in the connected world. Although, upon de novo glances, it strikes me as possibly being about life and death. I could relate and liked it well enough.

I know Whitman is a tremendously respected force among intelligentsia, so all I have to say in my own defense is that I am from Venus and he is from Mars. In so thinking I tugged at Edna St. Vincent Millay's dressing gown as she toppled off the shelf. In moments I was in her gossamer pocket wailing like a milk-starved baby. Simple and gut wrenching. She lived! And that is what I feel when my cheek is on her hand and she consoles me with the silk of common threads. It's a chick thing.

These men, let them beat their breasts watching spiders... for me, take my life in a word and sing it back.

Goodbye, Whitman. Goodbye and goodbye.

Visit Walt's grave.