After Whitman
An American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos
NATURE, continuous Me!
Saltness, and vigorous, never torpi-yeast of Me!
Florid, unceasing, forever expansive;
Not Schooled, not dizened, not washed and powdered;
Strait-laced not at all; far otherwise than polite;
Not modest, nor immodest;
Divinely tanned and freckled; gloriously unkempt;
Ultimate yet unceasing; capricious though determined;
Speak as thou listeth, and tell the askers that which they seek to know.
Thy speech to them will be not quite intelligible.
Never mind! utter thy wild commonplaces;
Yawp them loudly, shrilly;
Silence with shrill noise the lisps of the foo-foos.
Answer in precise terms of barbaric vagueness
The question that the Fun editor hath sparked through Atlantic cable
To W..T W..TM.N, the speaker of the pass-word primeval;
The signaller of the signal of democracy;
The seer and hearer of things in general;
The poet translucent; fleshy, disorderly, sensually inclined;
Each tag and part of whom is a miracle.
(Thirteen pages of MS. relating to Mr. W..t W..tm.n are here omitted.)
Rhapsodically state the fact that is and is not;
That is not, being past; that is, being eternal;
If indeed it ever was, which is exactly the point in question.
Anonymous.
Camerados
EVERYWHERE, everywhere, following me;
Taking me by the buttonhole, pulling off my boots, hustling me with the elbows;
Sitting down with me to clams and the chowder-kettle;
Plunging naked at my side into the sleek, irascible surges;
Soothing me with the strain that I neither permit nor prohibit;
Flocking this way and that, reverent, eager, orotund, irrepressible;
Denser than sycamore leaves when the north-winds are scouring Paumanok;
What can I do to restrain them? Nothing, verily nothing.
Everywhere, everywhere, crying aloud for me;
Crying, I hear; and I satisfy them out of my nature;
And he that comes at the end of the feast shall find something over.
Whatever they want I give; though it be something else, they shall have it.
Drunkard, leper, Tammanyite, small-pox and cholera patient, shoddy and codfish millionnaire,
And the beautiful young men, and the beautiful young women, all the same,
Crowding, hundreds of thousands, cosmical multitudes,
Buss me and hang on my hips and lean up to my shoulders,
Everywhere listening to my yawp and glad whenever they hear it;
Everywhere saying, say it, Walt, we believe it:
Everywhere, everywhere.
Bayard Taylor.
Imitation of Walt Whitman
WHO am I?
I have been reading Walt Whitman, and know not whether he be me, or me he;—
Or otherwise!
Oh, blue skies! oh, rugged mountains! oh, mighty, rolling Niagara!
Oh, chaos and everlasting bosh!
I am a poet; I swear it! If you do not believe it you are a dolt, a fool, an idiot!
Milton, Shakespere, Dante, Tommy Moore, Pope, never, but Byron, too, perhaps, and last, not least, Me, and the Poet Close.
We send our resonance echoing down the adamantine cañons of the future!
We live forever! The worms who criticise us (asses!) laugh, scoff, jeer, and babble babble—die!
Serve them right.
What is the difference between Judy, the pride of Fleet Street, the glory of Shoe Lane, and Walt Whitman?
Start not! ’Tis no end of a minstrel show who perpends this query;
’Tis no brain-racking puzzle from an inner page of the Family Herald,
No charade, acrostic (double or single), conundrum, riddle, rebus, anagram, or other guess-work.
I answer thus: We both write truths—great, stern, solemn, unquenchable truths—couched in more or less ridiculous language.
I, as a rule use rhyme, he does not; therefore, I am his Superior (which is also a lake in his great and glorious country).
I scorn, with the unutterable scorn of the despiser of pettiness, to take a mean advantage of him.
He writes, he sells, he is read (more or less); why then should I rack my brains and my rhyming dictionary? I will see the public hanged first!
I sing of America, of the United States, of the stars and stripes of Oshkosh, of Kalamazoo, and of Salt Lake City.
I sing of the railroad cars, of the hotels, of the breakfasts, the lunches, the dinners, and the suppers;
Of the soup, the fish, the entrées, the joints, the game, the puddings and the ice-cream.
I sing all—I eat all—I sing in turn of Dr. Bluffem’s Antibilious Pills.
No subject is too small, too insignificant, for Nature’s poet.
I sing of the cocktail, a new song for every cocktail, hundreds of songs, hundreds of cocktails.
It is a great and a glorious land! The Mississippi, the Missouri, and a million other torrents roll their waters to the ocean.
It is a great and glorious land! The Alleghanies, the Catskills, the Rockies (see atlas for other mountain ranges too numerous to mention) pierce the clouds!
And the greatest and most glorious product of this great and glorious land is Walt Whitman;
This must be so, for he says it himself.
There is but one greater than he between the rising and the setting sun.
There is but one before whom he meekly bows his humbled head.
Oh, great and glorious land, teeming producer of all things, creator of Niagara, and inventor of Walt Whitman,
Erase your national advertisements of liver pads and cures for rheumatism from your public monuments, and inscribe thereon in letters of gold the name Judy.
Judy.
Imitation of Walt Whitman
THE clear cool note of the cuckoo which has ousted the legitimate nest-holder,
The whistle of the railway guard despatching the train to the inevitable collision,
The maiden’s monosyllabic reply to a polysyllabic proposal,
The fundamental note of the last trump, which is presumably D natural;
All of these are sounds to rejoice in, yea to let your ribs re-echo with.
But better than all of them is the absolutely last chord of the apparently inexhaustible pianoforte player.
J. K. Stephen.
The Poet and the Woodlouse
SAID a poet to a woodlouse, “Thou art certainly my brother;
I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the Whole;
And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut and smother,
In the colors shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.
“Yea,” the poet said, “I smell thee by some passive divination,
I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house;
What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion,
Had the æons thought of making thee a man and me a louse.
“The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion,
Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test,
Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of question,
And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best.
“Man the fleshly marvel always feels a certain kind of awe stick
To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympholeptic weight;
Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch of solar caustic,
On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a Fate.”
“Notwithstanding which, O poet,” spake the woodlouse, very blandly,
“I am likewise the created,—I the equipoise of thee;
I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie
The inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.
“I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences,
And the air I breathe is colored with apocalyptic blush;
Ripest-budded odors blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,
And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.
“I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings,
Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee;
And earth’s soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs,
Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.
“And I sacrifice, a Levite; and I palpitate, a poet;
Can I close dead ears against the rush and resonance of things?
Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of her heroic;
Earth’s worst spawn, you said, and cursed me? Look! approve me! I have wings.
“Ah, men’s poets! men’s conventions crust you round and swathe you mist-like,
And the world’s wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod;
We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight,
And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells sweet to God.
“For he grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital handles,
Till a Godshine, bluely winnowed through the sieve of thunder-storms,
Shimmers up the non-existence round the churning feet of angels;
And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms.
“Friends, your nature underlies us and your pulses overplay us;
Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can ye sing right and steer wrong?
For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos,
Must be kneaded into drastics as material for a song.
“Eyes once purged from homebred vapors through humanitarian passion
See that monochrome a despot through a democratic prism;
Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration,
Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but a stronger-smelling chrism.
“Pass, O poet, retransfigured! God, the psychometric rhapsode,
Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars that blink;
All eternities hang round him like an old man’s clothes collapsèd,
While he makes his mundane music—and He will not stop, I think.”
Algernon Charles Swinburne.