Whitman in His Crises
Documents increase around the great and mysterious figure of Whitman, but they add little to his greatness and take away little from his mystery. The two volumes called The Gathering of the Forces contain after all only ephemeral material which Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle during his editorship in 1846-47 and which, though important because by him, would be less important if it were by any one else. And it might have been by almost any one else. Generally sensible, occasionally rather noble, now and then eloquent, often symptomatic of the prophet who was to come, these editorials and essays and book reviews are most of the time perfunctory and commonplace. Here Whitman loses himself in trivial political rows, echoes conventional opinions, scrambles up to a few peaks of originality with obvious effort. The demands of his occupation perhaps account for this; and yet at that very period he was beginning to undergo the spiritual upheaval which seems to have taken place in him during 1847-48 and out of which he emerged with his loins girded for the mighty race. Something of the nature of that upheaval appears in the manuscript notebooks lately published for the first time in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. What Whitman wrote for the Daily Eagle came, one may say, from the top of his head; in his notebooks he set down the record of dim perturbations which were then going on in his very spirit, his very tissue.
The moment when Whitman found his wings and dared them is the most interesting moment in his entire career. There the mystery of the poet centres. He who had once screamed with the spread-eagle now proposed to “sky-lark with God.” His excursion to New Orleans and back in 1848 does not sufficiently explain his awakening, much as it stirred him to wonder at the body of his land; neither does the troubled love which may then have entered his life and have shaken him out of his established routines. Some change was taking place in him, some annunciation, which roused the man into the seer. What are the actual causes and processes of that change no one yet knows how to explain. It may be God, it may be glands; it is the deep, unseen behaviour of genius.
I am habitually at a loss to know why so few critics of Whitman have paid due attention to what he himself reveals in his poems concerning the crucial moments in his growth. Is it because he dramatizes those moments with such fierce intensity that the biography in them is neglected? He is unmistakably explicit in his account of the experience reported in the fifth section of the Song of Myself, of his experience with what he called his Soul:
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers.”
Yet this mystical experience, which has been often noted, is in no respect more illuminating than the poetical experience of which Whitman tells quite as explicitly in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. In that supreme song of separation he not only gives voice to bereavement in the guise of a bird’s wailing for its lost mate by the seashore: he also records the sudden genesis of his consciousness that he was a poet, “the outsetting bard of love.”
“Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder, and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.”
Awakened to his function, however, and vowed to be the singer of death, Whitman had yet to find a mode of utterance. He would not find it among traditional modes because he was wedded to the conception of a new democratic aesthetic; he could not respond to current rhythms because he was too stoutly original. What happened he makes clear enough in Proud Music of the Storm. The poet lies in his “lonesome slumber-chamber” haunted by the rhythms of life:
“Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains,
Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras,
You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,
Blending with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.”
Thither come to him the strophes of love, of martial enterprises, of folk-dances, of the hymns of religions, till he is so shaken that
“Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)
Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,
The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,
Utter, pour in, for I would take them all.
Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervour,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
I said to my silent curious soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.
And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh screams,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers of harmonies,
Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps,
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in the night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.”
There was never a bolder conclusion to a poem in the world.