This site is devoted to Walt Whitman: his works, life, and my personal associaton with his works. Besides poetry, there are posts about music inspired by Whitman. Several posts focus on Whitman's New York.
It is organic. It is unstructured and unregulated. It has developed naturally. It seems to a native speaker such as myself unequaled in its richness, by which I mean to say the variety of source languages — such as the Germanic and French — out of which it grew, and its astonishing richness of vocabulary.
“The learned among the French will own that the comprehensiveness of expression is a glory in which the English tongue not only equals, but excels it neighbours.
“… it really is the noblest and most comprehensive of all the vulgar languages of the world.”
— Daniel Defoe, “Of Academies,” An Essay Upon Projects (1697)
NOTE: By “vulgar,” Defoe meant the word not in the sense commonly used today, but a commonly spoken tongue — as opposed to a language such as Latin, which was used at his time for scholarly writing and discourse.
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies. It involves so much; is indeed a sort of universal absorber, combiner, and conqueror. The scope of its etymologies is the scope not only of man and civilization, but the history of Nature in all departments, and of the organic Universe, brought up to date; for all are comprehended in words, and their backgrounds. This is when words become vitalized, and stand for things, as they unerringly and very soon come to do; in the mind that enters on the study with fitting sprit, grasp, and appreciation.”
— Walt Whitman, “Slang in America,” North American Review, November 1855
“The English language befriends the grand American expression … it is brawny enough and limber and full enough.”
– Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass
“What would you name as the best inheritance America receives from all the processes and combinations, time out of mind, of the art of man? One bequest there is that subordinates any perfection of politics, erudition, science, metaphysics, inventions, poems, the judiciary, printing, steam-power, mails, architecture, or what not. This is the English language—so long in growing, so sturdy and fluent, so appropriate to our America and the genius of its inhabitants.
“The English language is by far the noblest now spoken – probably ever spoken – upon this earth. It is the speech for orators and poets, the speech for the household, for business, for liberty, and for common sense. It is, indeed, as characterized by Grimm, the German scholar, ‘a universal language, with whose richness, sound sense, and flexibility, those of none other can for a moment be compared.’ ”
— Walt Whitman, “America’s Mightiest Inheritance” (an article published in the magazine Life Illustrated, April 12, 1856)
“Never will I allude to the English Language or tongue without exultation. This is the tongue that spurns laws, as the greatest tongue must. It is the most capacious vital tongue of all—full of ease, definiteness and power—full of sustenance.—An enormous treasure-house, or range of treasure houses, arsenals, granary, chock full with so many contributions from the north and from the south, from Scandinavia, from Greece and Rome—from Spaniards, Italians and the French,—that its own sturdy home-dated Angles-bred words have long been outnumbered by the foreigners whom they lead—which is all good enough, and indeed must be.—America owes immeasurable respect and love to the past, and to many ancestries, for many inheritances—but of all that America has received from the past, from the mothers and fathers of laws, arts, letters, &c., by far the greatest inheritance is the English Language—so long in growing—so fitted.”
“[T]he English [language] is like an English park, which is laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your fancy without having to fear a stern keeper of rigorous regulations. The English language would not have been what it is if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself.”
— Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905)
show that some, perhaps many, of my readers do not necessarily have a sensitivity to or appreciation of the fact that language is organic or of the magnificence of the English language as it has evolved.
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.
I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water,
Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,
Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,
Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and admirable to me than my mast-hemm’d Manhattan,
My river and sun-set, and my scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide,
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter*;
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water! and faithfully hold it, till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you;
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sun-lit water;
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!
— excerpted from Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
* A lighter is a flat-bottomed barge used to transfer cargo to and from ships in harbor.
“I see Christ once more eating the bread of his last supper, in the midst of youths and old persons, ”
— Walt Whitman, “Salut au Monde!,” Leaves of Grass (1856 edition)
How — by what miracle of human inspiration and creativity — does the self-educated poet Walt Whitman make the old and familiar seem fresh and new, as if we were encountering and hearing about it anew, or perhaps for the first time?
(Hint: It’s because he created everything anew, relying on no preexisting models or poetic tropes.)
I wrote that “walking, as is well known, is conducive to thinking and creativity, which is why so many writers and intellectuals have always been walkers.”
Dickens was a man of abundant, restless energy. His chief exercise was walking, and his “daily constitutionals,” as he referred to his long walks, could extend as far as twenty to thirty miles each day. He once wrote, “My only comfort is, in Motion,” and told John Forster that “if I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” — gallery text, “Charles Dickens and the Spirit of Christmas,” exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, November 2017
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least–and it is commonly more than that-–sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. … When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them–as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon–I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
“Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?”
“Song of the Open Road” (1856)
I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, and
bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within
me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they
came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my
bed, they came upon me.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1860)
My joys in the open air—my walks through the Mannahatta
“To My Soul” (1860)
I continually enjoy these streets, planned on such a generous scale, stretching far, without stop or turn, giving the eye vistas. I feel freer, larger in them. Not the squeezed limits of Boston, New-York, or even Philadelphia; but royal plenty and nature’s own bounty—American, prairie-like. It is worth writing a book about, this point alone. I often find it silently, curiously making up to me the absence of the ocean tumult of humanity I always enjoyed in New-York. Here, too, is largeness, in another more impalpable form; and I never walk Washington, day or night, without feeling its satisfaction.
In my walks I never cease finding new effects and pictures, and I believe it would continue so if I went rambling around here for fifty years.
Walt Whitman, Letter from Washington, New York Times, October 4, 1863
GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-
dazzling; ….
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers,
where I can walk undisturb’d; …
While yet incessantly asking, still I adhere to my city;
Day upon day, and year upon year, O city, walking
your streets, …
Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs! …
Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give
me the sound of the trumpets and drums! …
Give me the shores and the wharves heavy-fringed
with the black ships! …
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions,
pageants;
Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs, with the
beating drums, ….
Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus
—with varied chorus and light of the sparkling
eyes;
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.
“Give Me The Splendid Silent Sun” (1865)
NIGHT on the prairies;
The supper is over—the fire on the ground burns
low;
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;
I walk by myself—I stand and look at the stars,
which I think now I never realized before.
Leaves of Grass (1867)
My little dog is stretched out on the rug at full length, snoozing. He hardly lets me go a step without being close at my heels—follows me in my slow walks, & stops or turns just as I do.
letter from Whitman to his friend Pete Doyle, 26–27 March, 1874
SKIRTING the river road, (my languid forenoon walk, my rest,)
“The Dalliance of the Eagles” (1880)
I came down yesterday amid sousing rain & cloudy weather—but this forenoon it is sunshiny & delightful—I have just returned from a two hours ramble in the old woods—wintry & bare, & yet lots of holly & laurel—& I only wish I could send you some cedary branches thick with the china-blue little plums, so pretty amid the green tufts— … We had a flurry of snow last evening, & it looks wintry enough to-day, but the sun is out, & I take my walks in the woods.
letter from Whitman to Herbert Gilchrist, 30–31 December 1881
Thy windows rich, and huge hotels—thy side-walks wide;
Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
Thou, like the parti-colored world itself—like infinite, teeming,
mocking life!
Thou visor’d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!
“Broadway” (1888)
Sunday, October 21, 1888.
7.20 evening. W. lying on the bed, dressed, I entered very quietly: stood there without a word. He had been dozing. Started up. “Come in! Come in!” After we had shaken hands he described his day: “… he [Whitman] asked: “And you—what have you done with the day?” I had been far in the country on a long walk. I said something about “the joy of going on and on and not getting tired.” This aroused him. “I can fully realize that joy—that untranslatable joy: I have known its meaning to the full. In the old days, long ago, I was fond of taking interminable walks—going on and on, as you say, without a stop or the thought of a stop. It was at that time, in Washington, that I got to know Peter Doyle—a Rebel, a car-driver, a soldier: have you met him here? seen him? talked with him? Ah yes! we would walk together for miles and miles, never sated. Often we would go on for some time without a word, then talk—Pete a rod ahead or I a rod ahead. Washington was then the grandest of all the cities for such strolls. In order to maintain the centrality, identity, authority, of the city, a whole chain of forts, barracks, was put about it and roads leading out to them. It was therefore owing to these facts that our walks were made easy. Oh! the long, long walks, way into the nights!—in the after hours—sometimes lasting till two or three in the morning! The air, the stars, the moon, the water—what a fullness of inspiration they imparted!—what exhilaration! And there were the detours, too—wanderings off into the country out of the beaten path: I remember one place in Maryland in particular to which we would go. How splendid, above all, was the moon—the full moon, the half moon: and then the wonder, the delight, of the silences.” He half sat up in bed as he spoke. “It was a great, a precious, a memorable, experience. To get the ensemble of Leaves of Grass you have got to include such things as these—the walks, Pete’s friendship: yes, such things: they are absolutely necessary to the completion of the story.”
Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume 2
Tuesday, November 20, 1888.
W. had another letter for me. He picked it up from the accustomed place on the table. “It’s from Rossetti,” he said: ” I’ve been reading it over: William Rossetti: full of wise beautiful things—overflowing with genial winsome good will: you ‘ll feel its treasurable quality.” I sat there and read. He said: “Read it aloud: I can easily enjoy it again.” When I got to the passage describing the walks W. interrupted me: “Oh! that’s so fine—so fine, fine, fine: he brings back my own walks to me: the walks alone: the walks with Pete [Doyle, Whitman’s friend]: the blessed past undying days: they make me hungry, tied up as I am now and for good in a room …
Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume 3
AH, whispering, something again, unseen,
Where late this heated day thou enterest at my window, door,
Thou, laving, tempering all, cool-freshing, gently vitalizing
Me, old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat;
Thou, nestling, folding close and firm yet soft, companion better than
talk, book, art,
(Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the
rest—and this is of them,)
So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within—thy soothing fingers on
my face and hands,
Thou, messenger-magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me,
(Distances balk’d—occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot.)
I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes,
I feel the ocean and the forest—somehow I feel the globe itself swift-
swimming in space;
Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone—haply from endless store,
God sent,
(For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense,)
Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and
cannot tell,
Art thou not universal concrete’s distillation? Law’s, all Astronomy’s
last refinement?
Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?
“To The Sunset Breeze” (1890)
Friday, February 14, 1890
On B[uckwalter]. expressing his pleasure that W. got out of doors, W. said: “I got out yesterday—today it has not been possible. Yesterday’s jaunt—and it was quite a jaunt—was a fine one. The sky, the river, the sun—they are my curatives.”
Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden , Volume 6
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of
love within him, and freely pour’d it forth,
Who often walk’d lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his
lovers, …
wandering hand in hand, they twain
apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter’d the streets curv’d with his arm the shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon
him also.
“Recorders Ages Hence” (1891)
— Roger W. Smith
originally posted November 2017; updated December 2017
Note that Charles Dickens is said to frequently have taken long walks that could extend to twenty to thirty miles a day, and that Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that” walking. I wonder if Dickens really did thirty miles that often.
My record for a single day was two separate walks (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) of a combined total length of twenty-four miles. I try to take one very long walk once a week. This walk is usually about twelve miles, though sometimes I do around fifteen or sixteen miles.
However, it is noted in The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits by Les Standiford that Dickens went to work in a blacking factory at age twelve to support his family, which was in financial straits and that, after working all day, he would walk home every night, a distance of five miles.
Last night, on December 2, 2017, I attended a concert by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York.
The concert began with Handel’s Water Music Suite No. 2 in D Major.
It is good when hearing a musical composition such as the Water Music to see the actual players and how they are arranged on the stage. The horn player — essential to the piece — was at the rear, almost hidden behind the other musicians. The same players, pretty much, in the same arrangement, must have been performing on a barge in the first performance of the Water Music on July 17, 1717. The piece came through so strongly during last night’s performance, so convincingly, just as it must have three hundred years ago.
The second work on the program was Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major. It is the first of two cello concertos that Shostakovich composed for the great Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. What impresses me most, as shown in this work, is the “drive” and energy and the “forward motion” of Shostakovich’s music, which in effect propels the listener along.
The first movement opens with and is built upon a four-note motif from which the piece evolves, just as is the case with Beethoven’s fifth symphony, which opens with a famous four-note motif. It is quite likely that Shostakovich had Beethoven in mind. He is supremely innovative, very modern and often avant-garde, yet at the same time he is, paradoxically, very mindful of composers of the past.
I did not realize that Shostakovich’s two cello concertos were written so late in his career. The Cello Concerto No. 1 was first performed in 1959.
I have been reading a book about Walt Whitman and his views of death as revealed in his poetry: So Long!: Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death by Harold Aspiz.
I have been reading the book for several weeks — it seems like I’m never going to finish it.
It often takes me a long time to complete books. I plod along, sometimes reading only a page or two before stopping. I mull over passages and often stop to read them a second or third time and digest them after chewing over a passage and pausing to think.
Whitman’s views were continually evolving. He tried to reconcile them. He feared death. He often pretended not to, said (not ingenuously) that he welcomed it.
The author of the book about Whitman I am reading, Harold Aspiz, states:
Although he was acquainted with many of the scientific and religious movements of his age, Whitman could not accept the prevailing secular theories concerning death or those advocated by established religion. He viewed death as an eternal and benign mystery. … At times his poems approach death gladly, as if to embrace it; at times they treat it quizzically, revealing an uncertainty about his own assumptions.
I fear death. I don’t think about it all the time, but I fear it.
I was thinking during the concert of Handel in this connection, and by extension, of all art. It seems to be one way to transcend death, to become “immortal,” to live beyond one’s physical demise. The Water Music has not died, is not desiccated; it lives on in our hearing.
But there other ways to live on: in people’s memories.
Can you suggest other ways? It would be a comfort to be able to contemplate them.
There were over 600 students in the balcony, attending the concert free as guests of the orchestra. They clapped between each movement, a no-no. I forgive them!
I am not sure how the last part of the assertions made by Whitman might apply to me. But, I felt the truth of what he says about God’s presence everywhere during a day long ramble yesterday on Staten Island.
On Monday, November 6, 2017, I attended a performance of A German Requiem, to Words of the Holy Scriptures (“Ein deutsches Requiem, nach Worten der heiligen Schrift”) by Johannes Brahms at Carnegie Hall in New York. The work was composed between 1865 and 1868 and consists of seven movements. The work is, as noted in a Wikipedia entry, “sacred but non-liturgical,” which can be seen in the fact that it is not in Latin and is not based on the Latin mass.
The program notes state:
Unlike the traditional Requiem, a prayer for the dead, Ein deutsches Requiem speaks to the mourners, comforting them and reminding them that the inevitability of death makes it a part of life. … Bypassing the traditional prayers for the dead, Brahms selected his text from the German Lutheran Bible and the Apocrypha. In so doing, he expressed his own feelings toward death, which were not governed by a formal sense of religion. Ein deutsches Requiem focuses on the needs of the living — Brahms had considered calling it a “human” requiem — on the brevity of life and the expectation of “evige Freude,” eternal joy.
This brought to mind other famous requiems, namely Mozart’s and Berlioz’s requiems. Both use the traditional liturgy and, what is most notable, both are masses for the DEAD. They are solemn, mournful — without, I would say, a hint of joy, and, in the case of the Berlioz requiem (which is a masterpiece), I would say, scary, almost terrifying.
I could not help thinking also about the parallels with Walt Whitman and his views of death. Below are some excerpts from the text of the Brahms requiem and some observations about Whitman’s views on death and excerpts from his poems.
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden. (Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.) – Matthew 5:4
Die mit Tränen säen, werden mit Freuden ernten. Sie gehen hin und weinen und tragen edlen Samen, und kommen mit Freuden und bringen ihre Garben. (They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.) – Psalm 126:5,6
Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen. (For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.) – 1 Peter 1:24
Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit; aber ich will euch wieder sehen und euer Herz soll sich freuen und eure Freude soll neimand von euch nehmen. (And ye now therefore have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.) – John 16:22
Ich will euch trösten, wie Einen seine Mutter tröstet. (As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.) – Isaiah 66:13
Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis: Wir werden nicht alle entschlafen, wir werden aber alle verwandelt werden; und dasselbige plötzlich, in einem Augenblick, zu der Zeit der letzten Posaune. Denn es wird die Posaune schallen, und die Toten wervandelt werden. Dann wird erfüllet werden das Wort, das geschrieben steht: Der Tod is verschlungen in den Sieg. Tod, wo ist dein Stachel? Hölle, wo ist dein Sieg? (Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed … then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is they sting? O grave, where is they victory?) – 1 Corinthians 15:51, 52, 54, 55
Walt Whitman is a great poet of the joys of life, but he is equally a great poet of death. Few poets have been immersed in the mystery of death or lived so close to death as he did. Fewer still have treated death with such an eloquent voice or created such an awesome persona. Death is a major component of the richness and variety of Leaves of Grass. …. Whitman’s poetry illustrates the universal truth that death is not only the most overwhelming and the least understood event of our existence but also the most intriguing. He realized from the outset of his poetic career that if his poetry were to reflect the essence and scope of our life experiences — and those of his own life — it must speak of death openly, imaginatively, and unswayed by clichés or established doctrines. He became a sensitive student of death and dying, familiar with disease, anguish, violence, and the displays of both fear and courage among the many dying persons he observed.
“Death is a vital part of [Whitman’s]s gospel of universal brotherhood and sisterhood, of his luminous vision of the progressive unfolding of the human race … and of his profound spirituality. And it is a vital element in the yearning for love that permeates the poems. … He viewed death as an eternal and benign mystery. … At times his poems treat death gladly, as if to embrace it; at times they treat it quizzically.
Throughout Leaves of Grass he proclaimed his faith that death was not a plunge into the terminal nada and was convinced that we can live our life fully only if we are prepared to welcome death as a transition in a continued, but still mysterious, process of spiritual evolution. Underlying this conviction was his belief that death promises some kind of future continuity for everyone—and particularly for himself. And, as the poems reveal, this belief did not come easily but was part of a trying personal and ideological struggle. Moreover, he felt that a profound respect for death was fundamental to his aesthetic and to all great art. … [Whitman’s] “Song of Myself” contains some of the most affecting death scenes in all poetry. — Harold Aspiz, So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death (The University of Alabama Press, 2004)
Whitman had an intimate acquaintance of death as a volunteer nurse in Civil War hospitals. — Roger W. Smith
From the beginning Whitman seems to have recognized his ability to comfort the ailing immigrants and later the hospitalized horse-car drivers and injured firemen and soldiers by speaking with them in the humble manner that characterized his — and their — humble origins and by entering into their mode of thinking. — Harold Aspiz, So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death
The grave—the grave—what foolish man calls it a dreadful place? It is a kind friend, whose arms shall compass us round about, and while we lay our heads upon his bosom, no care, temptation, nor corroding passion shall have power to disturb us. Then the weary spirit shall no more be weary; the aching head and aching heart will be strangers to pain; and the soul that has fretted and sorrowed away its little life on earth will sorrow not any more.
I do not dread the grave. There is many a time when I could lay down, and pass my immortal part through the valley of the shadow, as composedly as I quaff water after a tiresome walk. For what is there of terror in taking our rest? What is there here below to draw us with such fondness? Life is the running of a race—a most weary race, sometimes. Shall we fear the goal, merely because it is shrouded in a cloud?
– “The Tomb-Blossoms,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January 1842
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
— Leaves of Grass
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s
compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
— Leaves of Grass
[A carlacue (variant of curlicue) is a fancifully curved or spiral figure.]
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
— Leaves of Grass
If all came but to ashes of dung,
If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! for we are betray’d,
Then indeed suspicion of death.
Do you suspect death? if I were to suspect death I should die now,
Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation?
— Leaves of Grass
Great is Death—sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together,
Death has just as much purport as Life has,
Do you enjoy what Life confers? you shall enjoy what Death confers,
I do not understand the realities of Death, but I know they are great,
I do not understand the least reality of Life—how then can I understand the realities of Death?
— Leaves of Grass
I do not know what follows the death of my body,
But I know well that whatever it is, it is best for me,
And I know well that what is really Me shall live just as much as before.
— Leaves of Grass
O the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons;
O that of myself, discharging my excrementitious body, to be burned, or rendered to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
My voided body, nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth.
— Leaves of Grass
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious [italic added] word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
— “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere, even in the room where I
eat or sleep, I should be satisfied,
And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly rendered to powder, and poured
in the sea, I shall be satisfied,
Or if it be distributed to the winds, I shall be satisfied.
— Leaves of Grass
Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)
O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death,
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,
Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer,
(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most,)
Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean.
— Leaves of Grass
My dead absorb or South or North—my young men’s bodies absorb, and their precious precious blood,
Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give my immortal heroes,
Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an atom be lost,
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.
— Leaves of Grass
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
– “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
I make a scene, a song, brief (not fear of thee,
Nor gloom’s ravines, nor bleak, nor dark—for I do not fear thee,
Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),
Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees
and flowers and grass,
And the low hum of living breeze—and in the midst God’s beautiful eternal right hand,
Thee, holiest minister of Heaven—thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all,
Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call’d life,
Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.
“Death’s Valley” (published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, April 1892):
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen (Blessed are they who bear suffering)
the opening of Ein deutsches Requiem
Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (For all flesh, it is as grass)
the second movement of Ein deutsches Requiem
This extraordinarily powerful, lyrical movement never fails to move me. I had long thought that the lyrics must mean something like: Let’s face it, everyone is going to die; death and decay are inevitable. But the words from scripture are actually consoling:
Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen.
So seid nun geduldig, lieben Brüder, bis auf die Zukunft des Herrn. Siehe, ein Ackermann wartet auf die köstliche Frucht der Erde und is geduldig darüber, bis er empfahe den Morgenregen und Abendregen.
Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit.
Die Erlöseten des Herrn werden wieder kommen, und gen Zion kommen mit Jauchzen; ewige Freude wird über ihrem Haupte sein; Freude und Wonne werden sie ergreifen und Schmerz und Seufzen wird weg müssen.
(For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.
Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandmen waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.
But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.
Those whom the Lord delivers shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.)
The music perfectly matches these sentiments.
Introitus
from Mozart, Requiem in D minor, K. 626
Requiem aeternam and Kyrie
from Berlioz, Grande Messe des morts (or Requiem), Op. 5
Pie Jesu
from Gabriel Fauré, Requiem in D minor, Op. 48
The focus of this “choral-orchestral setting of the shortened Catholic Mass for the Dead in Latin … is on eternal rest and consolation. … Fauré wrote of the work, ‘Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest.’ … He told an interviewer: ‘It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.’ (Wikipedia)
“Every soul has its own individual language, often unspoken, or lamely feebly haltingly spoken; but a true fit for that man, and perfectly adapted to his use.—The truths I tell to you or any other may not be plain to you, because I do not translate them fully from my idiom into yours.—If I could do so, and do it well, they would be as apparent to you as they are to me; for they are truths.—No two have exactly the same language, and the great translator and joiner of the whole is the poet, He has the divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President in the midst of his cabinet, and Good day my brother, to Sambo, among the hoes of the sugar field and both understand him and know that his speech is right.—”
— Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York University Press, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 60-61
This is characteristic Whitmanesque language. So bracing. So original. So simple and straightforward. Utterly sincere and spontaneous. Utterly unaffected. It feels like language made anew in the workshop of the consciousness. It is almost childlike in its simplicity yet profound in its implications. If feels as if not only were a new poetic language and grammar being invented, but as if the world were being seen anew with fresh eyes. Yet, not pompously from on high, but from the level of a friend of yours or mine — of the president or a slave — who can be so greeted without ceremony.
Critic Harold Bloom has observed that “Only a few poets in the language have surpassed [Walt Whitman’s poem] ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’.”
I believe that it is Whitman’s greatest poem, which is saying something. Close rivals for that distinction among Whitman’s poetry might be “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
I have posted here (above) two musical settings of “Lilacs.”
German composer Paul Hindemith, who lived in the United States for over a decade, set Whitman’s text to music to mourn the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The work, an oratorio, was titled “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem for those we love” (1946).
I have heard this work performed live once, at Carnegie Hall. It never fails to move me. The ninth track on the recording posted here, “Sing on! you gray-brown bird,” brings tears to my eyes.
The recording posted here is by the Robert Shaw Chorale, which commissioned the work, with the mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani. It is my favorite performance.
Also posted here is American composer Roger Sessions’s setting of the poem (1977), a cantata. It is noted in a Wikipedia entry that
The University of California at Berkeley commissioned American neoclassical composer Roger Sessions to set the poem as a cantata to commemorate their centennial anniversary in 1964. Sessions did not finish composing the work until the 1970’s, dedicating it to the memories of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and political figure Robert F. Kennedy. Sessions first became acquainted with Leaves of Grass in 1921 and began setting the poem as a reaction to the death of his friend, George Bartlett, although none of the sketches from that early attempt survive. He returned to the text almost fifty years later, composing a work scored for soprano, contralto, and baritone soloists, mixed chorus and orchestra. The music is described as responding “wonderfully both to the Biblical majesty and musical fluidity of Whitman’s poetry, and here to, in the evocation of the gray-brown bird singing from the swamp and of the over-mastering scent of the lilacs, he gives us one of the century’s great love letters to Nature.”
This recording is of a performance conducted by Seiji Ozawa.
“Two New Old Books That Show Walt Whitman’s Different Selves”
New York Times Book Review
August 30, 2017
hi, Zack —
This review by Ted Genoways is okay, but nothing more. Why did it take the NYTBR so long to review [two hitherto lost works by Walt Whitman] “The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle” and “Manly Health and Training”?
I thoroughly disagree with James McWilliams (“Against Rediscovery: Why the ‘Lost Novel’ Phenomenon Hurts Readers,” Paris Review, May 22, 2017). In the case of a Whitman or James Joyce, the discovery of a lost work or fragment, or of a lost letter, is cause for rejoicing.
I also feel that Genoways gives Whitman’s lost works “Jack Engle” and “Manly Health and Training,” which you have unearthed — remarkably — shorter shrift than they deserve.
Roger W. Smith's Walt Whitman site 