A Thread for thoughts on Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” - I will be making a comment each week after noting the corresponding verse from this early modern classic of American poetry in my regular Friday posts. This is a riff on the University of Iowa’s WhitmanWeb project, which provided commentary for each of the 52 verses, and a user forum.
I’ve picked up a copy of Mark Edmundson’s “Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy” and I may occasionally post a relevant excerpt or question. Edmundson “finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Whitman broke from past literature that he saw as “feudal”: obsessed with the noble and great. He wanted instead to celebrate the common and everyday. Song of Myself does this, setting the terms for democratic identity and culture in America.”
I can think of few more important aspirations at the crossroads our world faces in the coming year than to try to find connection and consensus. I’m calling this an exercise in: “If you want to change the world, start with yourself.”
Sort comments by “New First” for most recent week’s notes.
I'm wondering why this week's verse states things in the negative.
"If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing."
In the first line he says all of the thoughts he's expressed so far are universal, everyone everywhere in all times, but rather than become fulsome and praising, Walt seems to couch his summation in a kind of rebuke: if these thoughts are particular to you but bear no power over me - if ideas are not about the Big Things and figuring them out - if you don't feel them but just see them (or worse, shut your eyes to them,) they are worthless, or at least very unimportant.
And there's something to that, I suppose - I've often thought that in our drive for "survival" we get lost in the weeds, the picayune details, the me-me-woe-is-me pity party which in much of Western society is not really so much a question of survival but of status, and must look pretty ridiculous to the vast portion of humanity which does indeed fight for survival on a daily basis. (I will never forget the time a wealthy woman sat in a chair in our showroom and actually burst into tears because, God as my witness, she was going to have to drive to Tahoe for a ski weekend because her husband's jet was undergoing maintenance.)
Anyway, it seems to me that Walt gives us the measure of our attention and concern, the things that really are important: "This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe." It's in the things we share (or refuse to share) - the things we have in common, the most basic needs of all life on earth, and our field of shimmering grass which if you ask me, is a far more beautiful metaphor than ashes to ashes, or dust to dust.
Interestingly, the first part of the Genesis 3:19 from which the ashes and the dust derives, says: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken..." And what is bread but the fruit of grasses?
So I've said before that I don't feel like I'm especially lyrical in my writing - oh sure, I can turn a phrase, and I have a sharp eye for wit and wry humor - to each their own, and I suppose that if this verse is saying anything it's that we each have our own view, our own talents, our own place, and each of these is just another expression of a sort of Oversoul from which we all spring and to which we all return. But I gotta say that some of the commentary from the U of Iowa - this week by a "CM" in the Afterward - is really rather beautiful.
"For every bright sun that lights the sky there are innumerable dark suns, in galaxies near and far, around which we orbit unaware, now brushing up against someone or something with the key to a room in which the miraculous may reside, now veering off in another direction for reasons that mystify. That we do not always know why we do the things we do reminds us that we are caught up in the mysterious currents flowing through the universe, the sea charted in “Song of Myself,” and here we learn that the ship we boarded at the beginning of time is named Diversity." - CM
I'm reminded of a time when Diversity first struck me - it was at the pride parade in San Francisco, and it might have even been a member of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) who always got the biggest cheers, bless their huge and loving hearts - and the sign read "Difference Enriches Us All" - which is just another word for diversity, and I thought, you know what, that's right, how boring would it be if everyone were the same, if we didn't have the bumper cars of life bonking around in joyous new combinations but just some lockstep of sameness, ugh. So here we have an expression of those "mysterious currents" in Walt's "farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest." Fancy-man? I think he means me.
I love this line especially: "The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place." There's a yin/yang to this - his dark suns and his impalpable, which I might call the unknowable-not-now, the "abyss" with its dragons which I've actually never really thought of as a frightening thing, but one of adventure. I think this verse is proclaiming himself, and inviting us, to think of ourselves - all of us - as adventurers, fellow travelers.
I will confess that I have not yet made the time to really, slowly read and linger over each of the offerings in this week's verse, the second-longest in the poem. I will also confess that the technique, in fiction, often leaves me a little cold - I want to say I put down a book one time (I won't say who but they are on Substack) because there was just one too many catalogs of things, and I found it, if not lazy, at least not as "lyrical" as I imagined they thought it was. In any event, I've been super-duper busy busy reading for the BookLife Prize - 5 books/half a million words in 11 days (yes, I skim a bit) - and I haven't made the time.
But isn't that the puzzle of our lives, that Walt himself was trying to bring to our attention? Not so much that we don't have the time (usually) but that we don't make the time (often) for the things that really matter. My bad.
I'm going to call out three lines in the middle of these 75 which the U of Iowa foreword pointed out -
"The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you)" -
and note the commentary: "It is as if Whitman, in this catalogue of American life, is absorbing everything, accepting the nation’s wild diversity, pausing to reject just one thing: discrimination itself."
I have to say, I really love that; there was a time not so long ago when in the midst of my drinking, yes, I made a fool of myself, and people were unkind and disrespectful, and I felt enormous shame over it. This moment of compassion by Walt really moves me, and is a model to me for how to see people who have lost their way and may not know how to get back on track - thank god I did get sober, and can now pay the kindness back.
ALSO - I went and bought what I thought was a biography of Whitman, to supplement my understanding of the man and his milieu - "Walt Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative: The Pulitzer-Prize Winning Biography" by Emory Hollway Jr. A narrative? Yeah, whatever, that's cool. Published in 2022 it said; Pulitzer Prize it said.
Things started going sideways almost immediately when I found myself having to read the same sentences three times just to figure out what they were saying (and not always successfully.) Florid? You betcha. Verbose? Holy shit. Archaic? Um yeah. What the fuck was going on?
And then I came upon a passage where the author referred to milk cows as "milch" cows, and I was like, what the fuck is a milch cow?? So I looked it up, and it said it's just another word for milk, derived from Middle English! What the hell? What nut would use milch instead of milk in this day and age, ferchrissake?
Turns out, Mr. Hollway Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was published in 1926! And won the Pultizer in 1927!! Ah ha. And by the way, he's got none too many positive words, and all very veiled and circumspect, about the gay elephant in the room, so at this point I'm going to just finish it out as a soporific before bed, and then find myself (hopefully) a more clear, modern and accepting biography. I'll keep you posted...
I love this quote from the commentary by Ed Folsom of U of Iowa:
"Most of us spend our lives devoted to the distant and the abstract, only to recognize too late that the miracles all around us all the time are what we have deadened ourselves to. In this section, Whitman offers his most radical statement of democratic identity: “What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me.” This is the poet’s credo: he will discover himself not in the exotic, the faraway, the difficult, or the costly, but rather in the common people he encounters every day and the animals that inhabit and enliven his world."
How many times have I said that I'm tired of stories about super heroes, kings and queens, spies and magicians and stars? (Too many, if you ask my husband.) For so many years, I wrapped myself in a cocoon of escapism, trying to write fantasy stories that ultimately boiled down to hyper-stylized battles between ultimate good and evil. But I didn't really find my voice until I started writing about realistic people and events, the everyday moments, and small victories and defeats. How often has your darling said something so funny you've wished other people could have heard it? Must there be a studio audience to realize how precious and adorable your loved one is, or how courageous in the face of the trials we all inevitably face?
I think that's what this week's verse really urges so clearly: not holding out for heroes and riches, but finding the wealth of experience all around us, every day; not demanding that life supply us meaning (or else we'll declare it a meaningless vacuum) but opening ourselves to the riches the world lays at our feet every moment of our lives.
I love this line from the UofIowa's analysis this week: "This self-identification of the poet with the black dray-driver is another step toward a democratic way of thinking, as the poet becomes a caresser of all life (“not a person or object missing”), absorbing everyone and everything into his non-discriminating and always-expanding self."
I was just telling Kim Warner in our recorded conversation this week (post on Wednesday!) that I had a sort of epiphany, recently, about a kind of "witnessing" urge I've been having - and now of course I realize that it comes from Walt, and I suppose I don't feel any less enthralled that he is the source, but humble and grateful. It's this feeling that I can keep my eyes and ears open, and my mouth shut - that I can accept everyone on their own terms, and feel no need to categorize, to label or assess (and I suppose this includes me too - no more judging, no more fearing, no more less than.) And of course its within Song of Myself that this comes to me, so it's a sort of legacy from Uncle Walt I suppose.
And then there are the lines: "Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life." That's quite a statement! He goes further: "And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me."
And it's funny because I also told Kim that we don't find completion in our writing, but in our day-to-day lives - and this comes from Walt, too. And it's true, isn't it? In the eternal Now, there are no past achievements, no great accomplishments to raise our hats any higher than the heads on which they sit.
Is it possible that Walt really is seeping into my bones as we go? We're only on verse 13 of 52 - we still have 39 more to go! :)
From last week's play in the surf, and the gaze of the woman upon their bodies, we now have men at work, and Uncle Walt feasting his eyes on the "grimed and hairy chests" their lithe waists and massive arms of blacksmiths - dear me, is it possible WW's poetry was the erotic fiction of pre-Civil War America?
This is another one of those very short verses - the last one dealt with his childhood memory of a hayride on his family farm - but this one is all business, or is it?
On the one hand, I'm reminded of a slogan from certain rooms - "a worker among workers" - which is simply a reminder that we are part of a collective, and all have our parts to play - no one of us (despite many howls to the contrary) "superior" to any other.
The UofIowa's comment cites both the repetitive writing of words for writers, and a kind of flow state, where seemingly boring, repetitious work can lead us to intense embodiment. It just now occurs to me that one of the things that flow states often have in common is a kind of goal image, where the repetition melds with an imagined image of an endpoint, be it a performance, or a creation; in this case, the hammered creations of the forge that are the earliest and most basic kinds of technology that allowed humans to build the world around them.
I come back again and again to Walt's insistence that the divine is manifest in the body, that the soul and body are one, that every act is a holy act, including desire, looking, observing. Witnessing - that seems to be one of the big themes of this whole poem for me - I expect to see many more verses that remind us to treasure the here and now, the blood and sweat of work as much as the thrill and laughter of play. xo ~ MTF
I haven't said much about the obvious references to sex, esp. between men, that keep cropping up in SoM - I'm actually a little surprised that the poem received as much acclaim as it did, in that day, when it all seems so in your face - but maybe that's the modern me asserting that it is obvious, when a Victorian person might have no inkling of what was going on barely below the surface. So many references like "They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray" sprinkled everywhere - as a modern gay man, it doesn't seem so scandalous or titillating to me even if you read it loud and clear, though again, to a gay man at that time, it might have been incredibly thrilling to see even a veiled reference to men's bodies.
And speaking of men's bodies - the woman gazing, joining them in the water in her imagination - also seems to couch the act of looking at men in a palatable though still scandalous context - here, a woman takes the revolutionary action of looking and desiring men, and becomes the barely more acceptable stand-in for a man who looks at men.
There's a lot of "looking" in this poem, it seems to me - observing, wondering, witnessing - which in a way, was then - is still - perhaps a revolutionary act. So often we are encouraged to be the actors, to value action and certainty - a kind of arrogant "wholeness" - which does not admit to the need or desire to observe and assimilate new ways of thinking and seeing, but rather, to impose our way on others. Even our biggest "spectacles" - for example, American football - are not about creativity, but strategy, and the brute force of combat. "The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat." Uncle Walt is showing us another way.
These last three verses seem to invoke WW's spirit of the body - the City, the Country, and this week, the Frontier (but also the sea which brought Europeans and Africans to these shores.) He's not dwelling in the subatomic realm with his atoms, but he is in the world of the imagination because he never went out West, never sailed, or met an escaped slave.
Lately I have found myself very hesitant to speak about the conditions of Native Americans and Black Americans - I just watched "Stamped from the Beginning" on Netflix and was shocked by some of what I learned, just as I have been shocked to see what appears to be the rise of racism in America but is really only the opening of my eyes to the horrors that already existed. I accept people's acknowledgement of ancestral lands - personally, I was born on the traditional territory and homelands of the Tongva and Tataaviuk people. I find myself looking and listening more, and speaking less.
Perhaps for Walt, at that time, speaking of imaginary scenarios where the mixing of races was illegal and perilous was the radical voice. But it does strike me that "my eyes settle the land" has a faint tinge of Manifest Destiny about it, and that the "Land" was not in need of "settling." It was a different time. I'm just going to abide with this verse.
This is a funny little section, a throwback to Walt's early childhood on a farm on Long Island, and in keeping with my general habit of just letting the impressions pop out, this reminds me of the Shire in "Lord of the Rings." (Yes, I am a huge fan of Tolkien.) Specifically, it just reminds me of things I've read about Tolkien, how he was affected by WW1 (the movie "Tolkien" shows this beautifully) and longed for a return to a more pastoral existence that seems to have been lost forever - and as shown in the cacophony of city sounds and sights from the verse last week.
I have often wondered what the world would look like if the whole conquering-capitalism-colonial complex had never really taken off - if we'd all gone the way of the bonobos instead of the chimpanzees - and followed a generally more cooperative path than an adversarial one. This verse invokes that longing for a gentler acceptance, rather than an aggressive dominion, for me.
I'm going to start off this week's note with a note about the first two lines -
"The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand."
For some reason when I read that, and then read the 5th and 6th lines, I had it in my head that the baby was dead - it was only after I read the U of Iowa's Ed Folsom say it was sleeping did I realize that it was alive. But still I wonder: Why the gauze covering it like a shroud (or a sort of mosquito net, I guess)...? And why flies, which are traditionally associated with death and rot? I found it rather odd, and I still wonder if maybe WW is alluding to the emergence of life from death, which he's mentioned before, and bringing the full circle from the birth of the baby, to the lovers, to the suicide and death again.
There's a wonderful illustration by the artist James Christensen of an angel whispering "Mortua sum" which means "I am dead" in Latin, and it gave me a whole new appreciation for what "death" is, and often makes me think that the same place from which babies emerge is the place to which we return.
There's also the wonderful lyric from Sinéad O'connor's song "All Babies":
"All babies are born saying God's name
Over and over, all born singing God's name
All babies are flown from the universe
From there they're lifted by the hands of angels
God gives them the stars to use as ladders
She hears their calls, She is mother and father..." Anyway...
After these three couplets, there's fourteen lines cataloging all the sounds of the city, presumably his NYC, which run the gamut from the sounds of tires and footsteps, barkers and jokes, furious mobs and fights. It culminates with the third to the last line:
"What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum..."
According to Ed Folsom, this is the line which inspired Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" which has a whole catalog of its own exactly 100 years after, and is another one of the great American poems, by another homo, thank you very much.
I love how this sort of "movie" of sounds and images ends - "I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart" - another reference to the metaphor of the train passing through a view of mindfulness I've talked about before.
There are some great words in this verse - manifold, adjunct, immortal, fathomless - sometimes I find myself running to the dictionary to find precise definitions for words that I had only previously sort-of knew, but if asked what it means might stumble. "Manifold" for example, means many and various, also innumerable, but also, as a verb, to make a copy of - I'm reminded of the metaphor of grass that he has been using, how we are all "more alike than not" and it is our similarities which reinforce our shared humanity. "Adjunct" means supplementary to something else, or even subordinate - but here Walt refuses to admit that he is an adjunct to the earth, but rather, is the "mate" to humanity, in all its different stages and shapes and forms, none of which is "stale nor discarded." He insists that we are all immortal and fathomless, and that in a sense he holds us, each and every one of us, as part of himself.
I love the idea that we are all fathomless. How often have we though we understood someone, only to discover something about them later that completely upends our understanding? Or watch someone act so bravely (or so terribly) that again, we realize we don't really know anyone through and through, not even ourselves?
I think in this verse Walt is stepping beyond the known into the unknown, and in his tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and unshaken accceptance, every one of us is part of this fathomless, immortal manifestation of something bigger.
I'm reminded of all the systems we see nowadays - we've always had them but they seem to have proliferated like a hydra with the internet - systems which promise renewed youth, beauty, big muscles, silky hair, untold riches - we used to call it "snake oil" but now mostly just "content" and "marketing." Walt seems to always be looking past these things, beyond the quick fixes and the get rich quick schemes - no easy answers, just a greater comfort and acceptance of the important questions.
I just love this verse of “Song of Myself” - it’s the first time Uncle Walt really tackles the question of the grass in the title of the book in which the poem appeared, Leaves of Grass, and he does so as though from the perspective of a child, as if he is both teacher but also comrade, equally unsure of the true nature of the grass, and only able to offer guesses about what it is, and what it means.
He starts by identifying it with himself, “the flag” of his character and being; and then with the Lord, as a sign and symbol of the mystery of divinity that we can wonder about; and then as a kind of child itself, the “babe of vegetation”—maybe of Mother Nature and the divine feminine?
But then he goes on to describe it as a “uniform hieroglyphic” which Mark Edmundsom in Song of Ourselves calls WW’s “central image for democracy.” It is everywhere, among all people, one of the most common sights wherever you are, and whoever. Edmundson goes on to describe the leaves of grass as more alike than different, and reaching its greatest glory in huge swaths, green in the spring when it is newborn, and the amber waves of grain in its maturity.
And finally Walt compares it to the “beautiful uncut hair of graves” and a number of passages in which grass is shown to spring forth from young people cut down in their prime, and old people—and then, he goes so far as to say “They are alive and well somewhere” which I find so beautiful and comforting. Mark Edmundson believes the next line is one of the most important of the poem: “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.”
This is all so rich with love for his fellow humans, and with the egalitarian, democratic spirit, where every one of us is equal to every other one, and that we can be both individuals, as well as a great people together.
I do sometimes feel like we have never really completed this cycle of democratic transformation, that we are more than ever caught up in the mercenary scramble to the top of the heap, lionizing those who have reached some theoretical pinnacle—usually by virtue of the number of dollar signs amassed rather than by the expansiveness of their character.
We have been watching this documentary on Netflix, “Alexander - The Making of a God” and I just want to let that sink in—that one of the oldest and “greatest” of our historical persons is remembered mainly for war, conquest and domination. It seems to me the vision Walt Whitman presents is one which transcends this model, and still holds greaestt promise for our future.
“Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.”
Loafing seems to be WW’s favorite activity and mode of being, and here it reminds me very much of meditation - a wordless, quiet, unpatterned, “should-less” (“not custom or lecture, not even the best”) abiding, except perhaps for this lull, this hum of a “valvèd voice” which could almost be, perhaps, a mantra—the sacred “Om”—more of a sound than a word. I find something very comforting in this idea that loafing could be a kind of sacred activity, especially when we are indoctrinated into this regime of enterprise, multi-tasking, and side-hustling (hustle, as in, “move it or lose it”—as though simply being, enjoying the moment, is some kind of modern sin against ambition, progress and capitalism.)
In this verse, we have the Self/Body and the Soul apparently in erotic union, as equals, neither abasing itself to the other while so much of literature (and scripture) before the modern era placed the Soul at the top of a definite hierarchy in which the body, and especially sex, were placed at a sinful depth. This is a remarkable moment in the 19th century, to imagine both the body lifted up to a state of grace, and the soul or spiritual self helped down from its pedestal to assume its place among the pleasures and delights of the embodied world.
I love that in that moment of the joining of the Self and the Soul, WW gives to us such a beautiful assurance of the divine in us, where “the hand of God is the promise of my own … the spirit of God is the brother of my own” and he goes on to identify with all people as his brothers and sisters, as well as all life—trees and ants alike—and that love is the “kelson” (a shipbuilding term) or foundational supporting structure of creation.
Mark Edmundson in “Song of Ourselves” talks quite a bit about the move from a hierarchical structure of society (the feudal structure of lord/subject, or “God” and sinners) to a dialectical one, in which the Self and the Soul, or the Body and the Divine are in conversation with each other, rather than one in service to the other, as represented in this invitation to the Soul to loaf in the grass with the body. He has some interesting comments:
“In a hierarchical world, the Soul might choose to stay in hiding to avoid humiliations. But in a world without superiors and inferiors, the Soul’s humane, democratic pride can stay intact … People may become more sympathetic, and also more creative, in a culture where they can sustain their dignity all the time. They will not have to surround themselves with defenses to fend off insults, implicit and overt, from others … Democracy, Whitman suggests, is where the Soul can be most free … We need to be reminded, and Whitman does remind us, that we in this democracy are brothers and sisters—all of us, from the most to the least. We may grow angry with each other. But we must never despise each other or hold each other in contempt … in a democracy, we must strive to be friends.”
A tall order, for sure—progress not perfection, of course. But also, this stands in such stark contrast to the current political currents around the world, where anger and denunciation seem to be getting more and more shrill. I’d love to believe that fascism is getting louder because it’s feeling more threatened than ever, but that remains to be seen.
"Should" - I feel like the note for this week's verse is all the Shoulds of life, all the things other people are telling us are important, almost our duty to uphold, and to which WW is saying, "No thanks." This includes the "heroes" of every age, the people we are told to honor - the "Greats" - as though they were not also human beings - as though much time and money weren't spent on manipulating those images, their trappings and titles and divine rights - and as though their image in our popular imagination doesn't have more to do with our need for golden calves than who they actually were. I think WW would say the same of himself, our great bard: "Witness, and wait..." Attend, but do not worship. There is something so much more important at the heart of this poem than the lionization of the poet, which I think is true of art in general - and something all too easy to forget with our prizes and accolades.
I'm reminded of a popular metaphor of meditation, which says our thoughts are like a moving train that we watch from a point beside the track - notice each car as it is in front of you, and then let it pass - this is a way to imagine the self, not as an accumulation of all these individual cars and their contents, people, stuff, but as the constant passage into and then back out of our awareness. "These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself." At this point I would actually be surprised if Whitman had not read Thoreau and some of Indian philosophy.
But another thing I'm reminded of is the concept of "keep your own side of the street clean" - this is popular in 12-step programs, and a reminder to worry about your own life (and sobriety) and let others worry about theirs. "I have no mockings or arguments..." I've personally found a great deal of wisdom in that, something along the lines of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt..." But even more, it's a kind of curiosity, and humbleness: "Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it." Wondering... I like that, what a positive and open stance to take in life.
I had a vision while reading this verse of life unending, as if the child is just a limb of the parent—the same life with fresh eyes, a new day—the NOW day—and though the links in the chain (of DNA?) may separate, they remain a part of a greater whole, and become a part again on the other side. It is sometimes hard to remember that, despite however difficult and trying it can sometimes be, life is an unbroken chain of birth, joining, and procreation going back to the first proto-cells—we are all a success story, and a single, great family—it really is a knitting together of life.
I’m fascinated by Ed Folsom’s comment on the second stanza:
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
“Now” is repeated four times, and refers to inception (beginning, birth) and “youth or age” (the stages of life) and perfection (now, Nirvana?) and finally, heaven or hell, our final, illusory destination. Whitman is saying that perfection, everything we need, resides in the eternal NOW, there is nothing after now (because once we arrive, there we are again—Now,) nor anything better—right now we have everything we need to live in perfect happiness and delight. I love this. I would say, too, that in all of his reading, I wouldn’t be surprised if WW read about and found inspiration in Eastern philosophy and Buddhism (as I recall, Thoreau and Emerson both read from Eastern texts.)
In this verse, we are also talking again about the unity of body and soul, the material and the divine by my way of thinking, and how “lacks one lacks both”—they are knitted together, these two seemingly different states - in actuality, they are so deeply intertwined, we are mistaken in rejecting either, or of elevating one over the other. I think this is at the heart of his “democracy” really, this rejection of hierarchy and exclusion, and his inviting us to instead cast off our assumptions and arrogance, and embrace the unifying experience of the now.
Hello again, moving on to the 2nd verse of “Song of Myself” and this one starts out with a really interesting metaphor:
“Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.”
What are the perfumes? Books, we are told, by both Ed Folsom at UofIowa and Mark Edmundson. I’m often not great at interpreting these sorts of poetic metaphors so I appreciate it’s just being spelled out for me, and apparently, in an early notebook WW explicitly said that literature was a perfume in the sense that it fills our minds with a pervasive—and hard to resist—way of perceiving.
I think this definitively answers Jeffrey Streeter’s comment from last week about whether WW was widely read—definitely yes. He loves reading, apparently, but he has a healthy skepticism for it. The views expressed by others are not without their bias, but WW is saying we can find the unvarnished truth of the world by using our own senses, and goes on in a passage which invokes all of them, and some erotic imagery too (“love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine…A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms.”) It’s the undistilled perception through the body (his “respiration and inspiration”) which is the true source of all we know, and all of the books that went before must be seen for what they are, “second or third hand.”
I want to take a moment to also point out another possibility, and specifically, why he might have chosen the notion of perfumes to describe the literary tradition—possibly by pointing to that greatest of traditions/dogmas, the Bible. At that time (and possibly still, in the Western world) if there is only one book in a home, that book is probably a Bible, and I wonder if the perfume might not also be alluding to the incense of churches? His parents were Quaker, apparently, so it’s hard to know if he was even familiar with the smoking pendulums employed in Catholic churches, but he was a pretty smart guy. It just seems to me he’s employing here a trope very similar to the break from the Catholic church represented in the Protestant reformation—dispense with the middlemen, go direct to the source, only in this case, he’s even throwing the Bible with its “perfumes” out the window, and then throwing off his clothes and running out the door naked, no filters whatsoever. “Ultimately, Whitman wants to show us how to live a righteous life that is not based on commandments and constraints.” (ME, SoO)
One other point I found really interesting in Mark Edmundson’s book returns to the idea of democracy. “Most writing up until 1855 had been feudal: that is, it celebrated the aristocratic, the rich, the extraordinary. Whitman devotes himself to writing about the common and everyday: that’s the kind of poetry a democracy needs. We’re done with kings, done with pontentates of all sorts…He’s an American Adam—a useful term put forward by the critic R.W.B. Lewis—who wants to begin life all over.” And: “To be naked is to jettison identifying class markers.” (ME, SoO)
This is fascinating, and to me, bolsters the idea that a priest is just another kind of aristocrat, elevating or interceding between us and the divine (and in the case of the Pope, an actual king.) But more specifically, as a writer, I am struck by how much literature indeed is concerned with the wealthy, the powerful, or the extraordinary even today—the new aristocracy of democracies, the super-wealthy and famous, or just as often, the super-human: vampires, spies, super- and action heroes, wildly talented martial artists whose skills defy physics.
We continue to idolize these qualities the way we conduct our politics—trickle-down, all of the attention, money and importance lavished at the manufactured tip of a human pyramid, while the plebs at the base are gun downed, literally and figuratively, just so much fuel for the heroic lives of the privileged and self-important few.
WW was urging us to dispense with all of this nonsense 169 years ago. We are incredibly slow learners.
I wish you would go on! First and perhaps foremost, “I call it “GG” for secret reasons”, I adore you. Secondly, “is an invocation of a combined spiritual element between the self (my self, your self, our selves) and a simple delight in, and reverence for, life.” made me fall even more deeply in love with this poem, so thank you. I also took this opening to be speaking to a mystical view of existence, separation being an illusion, the universe and everything in it being one thing, and nothing goes unaffected by anything else, whether perceived or not. I found myself pausing on ‘assume’, my brain always goes to the ‘suppose to be the case’ meaning, but here I assume(!) WW to be meaning ‘what I take on, you shall take on’, again reflecting that view, maybe even alluding to morality and karma, but at least saying that ‘my’ joy, my sins, my fears and delights are all equally ‘yours’. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on ‘as good’, in that last line, if you have any…
Thanks again for doing, my dear. It’s my / your / our joy 💗
Thank you, Troy for this lovely initiative! It's always wonderful to read great poetry, and Whitman is magnificent at his best, as here.
I guess my starting point for thinking about a poem is to consider why it's a poem and not a few lines of prose with similar content. Put another way, what is it doing that only a poem can do? The opening line, which you highlight below, gives us a clue, with its strong rhythm (essentially, blank verse) with its echo of MIlton, which is picked up by the use of "sing" (Paradise Lost begins with "sing" as arguably the main verb though it's an imperative), but we have to wait for line 6 for it to arrive. This suggests to me that there is a conscious or unconscious sense of poetic legacy here. In this case, it's also a point of departure, because Whitman will celebrate himself and sing himself. He's not asking a muse (as Milton) and he's not describing the Fall of Man (as in Paradise Lost). I don't know whether Whitman had read Milton, but on this evidence, I'd say he had. And he's breaking away from tradition while acknowledging it and putting himself in relation to it. Which is very energising!
I also note Whitman's use of "m" and "s" sounds in the opening lines as well as the repetition of "myself" (with a different meaning). It's beautifully crafted; how he gives emphasis to the meaning of the key words through these sound clusters. And then there's his intriguing use of the word "assume," with its various meanings all in play here.
As you say, there's a lot going on in this rich and subtle poem - just in those opening lines. Thank you for the chance/permission to indulge myself in this way! I hope I haven't overdone it. :)
Thanks for stopping by my - *OUR* - little project. I hope you will get as much out of this deep-dive into "Song of Myself" (SoM) as I do. Some important notes re: Walt Whitman (WW) before I delve a bit deeper.
Walt Whitman had no formal education. He could read, wrote fiction and journalism pieces, and was a typesetter. When he self-published his first book of poetry "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 - which contained the first, untitled version of SoM - he had been working as a carpenter framing houses in Brooklyn. “Scholars say that Song is the first significant instance of free verse,” says Mark Edmundson in “Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy.” (ME/SoO for citations - I have the Kindle version, so I can’t note page numbers.)
As mentioned in the first verse, he had just turned 37, and the American “experiment” - a nation with a constitutional democracy for the first time since the ancient Greeks - was not 80 years old. The formal discovery of the atom - though also deriving from an ancient Greek precursor - was even newer.
This is the ground from which Walt Whitman emerged as one of the most respected and beloved American poets.
I don’t want to spend too much time discussing the significance and legacy of Walt or his other poetry - this isn’t a university course, and I’m hardly a scholar. I’ll try to stick each week to the relevant verse, and any details or bits of information that I glean from U. of Iowa’s WhitmanWeb project, or Mark Edmundson’s book - or other books or relevant research I pick up along the way - will mostly be sprinkled in to help me elucidate a point about how the poem and its ideas affect me.
By all means, I hope YOU will feel free to discuss anything about WW, his poetry, your own insights and research, and I will do my best to respond and acknowledge the contributions of everyone who drops in.
I CELEBRATE MYSELF…?
I just want to make note of those first three words, because this poem is all about identity, and the dichotomy between I and You is significant (“I” is the first word of the poem, and “you” the last.) But celebrate? Here are some words associated with “celebrate” according to WordHippo.com, my go-to for synonyms and such: Joyous. Appreciation. Honor. Triumphant. Elation. Jubilation. Pleasure. Satisfaction. Also: To perform a (usually religious) rite or ceremony.
What I’m seeing here is a declaration of love, from WW toward himself, of course, but in another sense - and significantly, in the evolving relationship between “I” and “You” throughout the poem - it is an invocation of a combined spiritual element between the self (my self, your self, our selves) and a simple delight in, and reverence for, life.
I have to admit that it is deeply moving to me to think this poem is a convocation of love and life, of a spiritual component to each of us and our birthright as living beings. Much of my personal spiritual journey and sobriety is built on an attempt to understand where “spirit” resides, and I am heartened to find in SoM a very powerful declaration that “God” - or goddess, deity, spirit, unity, higher power, whatever you call it (I call it “GG” for secret reasons) - is alive in every one of us.
BUT WHO IS THE “YOU” in the first line?
It’s tempting to think that “you” is the reader, simple enough, and obviously he is trying to draw us in to his ritual. But Mark Edmundson believes it’s Walt’s own Soul, which he invites in the next line. “The Soul - at least Whitman’s Soul - is uneasy about entering the world as it is. Yet to Whitman, the Soul belongs to the world. It is rightly one with the physical-every atom that belongs of the Self belongs to the Soul as well, or at least it could.” (ME,SoO)
I find this a really interesting interpretation, inviting a oneness between the body and the soul, the spiritual and material worlds, which I wholeheartedly accept and agree with - to me, they are two sides of the same coin, Being and Transcendence, the same essence in different aspects.
But I’m also still stuck on the idea that he IS speaking to the reader, and I don’t think we must necessarily say the Reader and the Soul are mutually exclusive. Perhaps - bear with me - Being is the differentiated form of a universally shared Transcendence, and when he refers to “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he means a shared, universal Soul expressed through the multiplicity and interconnectedness of the material world.
Ed Folsom’s WhitmanWeb entry mentions WW’s abandonment “...of the two main things that separate people, that create animosity, jealousy, and war—beliefs and possessions: “what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to you as good belongs to me.” At every level of our being, we are incessantly transferring and exchanging materials, ideas, emotions, affections. The atoms that yesterday composed a living cow or a growing plant today are part of us, as the eternal atoms of the universe continue their nonstop interaction and rearrangement.”
This echoes the Buddhist concept of eternal change - birth, life, death, rebirth - and how the spiritual path leads beyond dogma (“Creeds and schools in abeyance”) and the illusions of security, wealth, and power, to a oneness, an egalitarianism within individuality, which sweeps away accidents of birth and fortune (an artificial aristocracy) to arrive at a true democratic vision: we are all, eternally, One - no better and no less than each other, because we all spring from the same undifferentiated spiritual ground.
I could go on, but I won’t. I’ll try to be a little more succinct in the future - no promises - feel free to skim. There’s so much here, it’s so dense and rich, but I would love to hear from YOU. ~ T. xo
I told my friend what I was doing with SoM and he was like, "Oh! Kinda like that Julia Child movie... 'Julie & Julia...'" Hmmm... Maybe some next step will emerge along the way, I'm staying open to all the possibilities presented by the reading and the comments and the spirit of Uncle Walt. 🤍
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-17
I'm wondering why this week's verse states things in the negative.
"If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing."
In the first line he says all of the thoughts he's expressed so far are universal, everyone everywhere in all times, but rather than become fulsome and praising, Walt seems to couch his summation in a kind of rebuke: if these thoughts are particular to you but bear no power over me - if ideas are not about the Big Things and figuring them out - if you don't feel them but just see them (or worse, shut your eyes to them,) they are worthless, or at least very unimportant.
And there's something to that, I suppose - I've often thought that in our drive for "survival" we get lost in the weeds, the picayune details, the me-me-woe-is-me pity party which in much of Western society is not really so much a question of survival but of status, and must look pretty ridiculous to the vast portion of humanity which does indeed fight for survival on a daily basis. (I will never forget the time a wealthy woman sat in a chair in our showroom and actually burst into tears because, God as my witness, she was going to have to drive to Tahoe for a ski weekend because her husband's jet was undergoing maintenance.)
Anyway, it seems to me that Walt gives us the measure of our attention and concern, the things that really are important: "This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe." It's in the things we share (or refuse to share) - the things we have in common, the most basic needs of all life on earth, and our field of shimmering grass which if you ask me, is a far more beautiful metaphor than ashes to ashes, or dust to dust.
Interestingly, the first part of the Genesis 3:19 from which the ashes and the dust derives, says: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken..." And what is bread but the fruit of grasses?
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-16
So I've said before that I don't feel like I'm especially lyrical in my writing - oh sure, I can turn a phrase, and I have a sharp eye for wit and wry humor - to each their own, and I suppose that if this verse is saying anything it's that we each have our own view, our own talents, our own place, and each of these is just another expression of a sort of Oversoul from which we all spring and to which we all return. But I gotta say that some of the commentary from the U of Iowa - this week by a "CM" in the Afterward - is really rather beautiful.
"For every bright sun that lights the sky there are innumerable dark suns, in galaxies near and far, around which we orbit unaware, now brushing up against someone or something with the key to a room in which the miraculous may reside, now veering off in another direction for reasons that mystify. That we do not always know why we do the things we do reminds us that we are caught up in the mysterious currents flowing through the universe, the sea charted in “Song of Myself,” and here we learn that the ship we boarded at the beginning of time is named Diversity." - CM
I'm reminded of a time when Diversity first struck me - it was at the pride parade in San Francisco, and it might have even been a member of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) who always got the biggest cheers, bless their huge and loving hearts - and the sign read "Difference Enriches Us All" - which is just another word for diversity, and I thought, you know what, that's right, how boring would it be if everyone were the same, if we didn't have the bumper cars of life bonking around in joyous new combinations but just some lockstep of sameness, ugh. So here we have an expression of those "mysterious currents" in Walt's "farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest." Fancy-man? I think he means me.
I love this line especially: "The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place." There's a yin/yang to this - his dark suns and his impalpable, which I might call the unknowable-not-now, the "abyss" with its dragons which I've actually never really thought of as a frightening thing, but one of adventure. I think this verse is proclaiming himself, and inviting us, to think of ourselves - all of us - as adventurers, fellow travelers.
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-15
I will confess that I have not yet made the time to really, slowly read and linger over each of the offerings in this week's verse, the second-longest in the poem. I will also confess that the technique, in fiction, often leaves me a little cold - I want to say I put down a book one time (I won't say who but they are on Substack) because there was just one too many catalogs of things, and I found it, if not lazy, at least not as "lyrical" as I imagined they thought it was. In any event, I've been super-duper busy busy reading for the BookLife Prize - 5 books/half a million words in 11 days (yes, I skim a bit) - and I haven't made the time.
But isn't that the puzzle of our lives, that Walt himself was trying to bring to our attention? Not so much that we don't have the time (usually) but that we don't make the time (often) for the things that really matter. My bad.
I'm going to call out three lines in the middle of these 75 which the U of Iowa foreword pointed out -
"The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you)" -
and note the commentary: "It is as if Whitman, in this catalogue of American life, is absorbing everything, accepting the nation’s wild diversity, pausing to reject just one thing: discrimination itself."
I have to say, I really love that; there was a time not so long ago when in the midst of my drinking, yes, I made a fool of myself, and people were unkind and disrespectful, and I felt enormous shame over it. This moment of compassion by Walt really moves me, and is a model to me for how to see people who have lost their way and may not know how to get back on track - thank god I did get sober, and can now pay the kindness back.
ALSO - I went and bought what I thought was a biography of Whitman, to supplement my understanding of the man and his milieu - "Walt Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative: The Pulitzer-Prize Winning Biography" by Emory Hollway Jr. A narrative? Yeah, whatever, that's cool. Published in 2022 it said; Pulitzer Prize it said.
Things started going sideways almost immediately when I found myself having to read the same sentences three times just to figure out what they were saying (and not always successfully.) Florid? You betcha. Verbose? Holy shit. Archaic? Um yeah. What the fuck was going on?
And then I came upon a passage where the author referred to milk cows as "milch" cows, and I was like, what the fuck is a milch cow?? So I looked it up, and it said it's just another word for milk, derived from Middle English! What the hell? What nut would use milch instead of milk in this day and age, ferchrissake?
Turns out, Mr. Hollway Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was published in 1926! And won the Pultizer in 1927!! Ah ha. And by the way, he's got none too many positive words, and all very veiled and circumspect, about the gay elephant in the room, so at this point I'm going to just finish it out as a soporific before bed, and then find myself (hopefully) a more clear, modern and accepting biography. I'll keep you posted...
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-14
I love this quote from the commentary by Ed Folsom of U of Iowa:
"Most of us spend our lives devoted to the distant and the abstract, only to recognize too late that the miracles all around us all the time are what we have deadened ourselves to. In this section, Whitman offers his most radical statement of democratic identity: “What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me.” This is the poet’s credo: he will discover himself not in the exotic, the faraway, the difficult, or the costly, but rather in the common people he encounters every day and the animals that inhabit and enliven his world."
How many times have I said that I'm tired of stories about super heroes, kings and queens, spies and magicians and stars? (Too many, if you ask my husband.) For so many years, I wrapped myself in a cocoon of escapism, trying to write fantasy stories that ultimately boiled down to hyper-stylized battles between ultimate good and evil. But I didn't really find my voice until I started writing about realistic people and events, the everyday moments, and small victories and defeats. How often has your darling said something so funny you've wished other people could have heard it? Must there be a studio audience to realize how precious and adorable your loved one is, or how courageous in the face of the trials we all inevitably face?
I think that's what this week's verse really urges so clearly: not holding out for heroes and riches, but finding the wealth of experience all around us, every day; not demanding that life supply us meaning (or else we'll declare it a meaningless vacuum) but opening ourselves to the riches the world lays at our feet every moment of our lives.
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-13
I love this line from the UofIowa's analysis this week: "This self-identification of the poet with the black dray-driver is another step toward a democratic way of thinking, as the poet becomes a caresser of all life (“not a person or object missing”), absorbing everyone and everything into his non-discriminating and always-expanding self."
I was just telling Kim Warner in our recorded conversation this week (post on Wednesday!) that I had a sort of epiphany, recently, about a kind of "witnessing" urge I've been having - and now of course I realize that it comes from Walt, and I suppose I don't feel any less enthralled that he is the source, but humble and grateful. It's this feeling that I can keep my eyes and ears open, and my mouth shut - that I can accept everyone on their own terms, and feel no need to categorize, to label or assess (and I suppose this includes me too - no more judging, no more fearing, no more less than.) And of course its within Song of Myself that this comes to me, so it's a sort of legacy from Uncle Walt I suppose.
And then there are the lines: "Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life." That's quite a statement! He goes further: "And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me."
And it's funny because I also told Kim that we don't find completion in our writing, but in our day-to-day lives - and this comes from Walt, too. And it's true, isn't it? In the eternal Now, there are no past achievements, no great accomplishments to raise our hats any higher than the heads on which they sit.
Is it possible that Walt really is seeping into my bones as we go? We're only on verse 13 of 52 - we still have 39 more to go! :)
Ha, just coincidentally came across this. My last post revolves around the much quoted "so I contradict myself" verse from Song of Myself 51. In case anyone's interested: https://constantinemarkides.substack.com/p/im-getting-divorced
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-12
From last week's play in the surf, and the gaze of the woman upon their bodies, we now have men at work, and Uncle Walt feasting his eyes on the "grimed and hairy chests" their lithe waists and massive arms of blacksmiths - dear me, is it possible WW's poetry was the erotic fiction of pre-Civil War America?
This is another one of those very short verses - the last one dealt with his childhood memory of a hayride on his family farm - but this one is all business, or is it?
On the one hand, I'm reminded of a slogan from certain rooms - "a worker among workers" - which is simply a reminder that we are part of a collective, and all have our parts to play - no one of us (despite many howls to the contrary) "superior" to any other.
The UofIowa's comment cites both the repetitive writing of words for writers, and a kind of flow state, where seemingly boring, repetitious work can lead us to intense embodiment. It just now occurs to me that one of the things that flow states often have in common is a kind of goal image, where the repetition melds with an imagined image of an endpoint, be it a performance, or a creation; in this case, the hammered creations of the forge that are the earliest and most basic kinds of technology that allowed humans to build the world around them.
I come back again and again to Walt's insistence that the divine is manifest in the body, that the soul and body are one, that every act is a holy act, including desire, looking, observing. Witnessing - that seems to be one of the big themes of this whole poem for me - I expect to see many more verses that remind us to treasure the here and now, the blood and sweat of work as much as the thrill and laughter of play. xo ~ MTF
Link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-11
I haven't said much about the obvious references to sex, esp. between men, that keep cropping up in SoM - I'm actually a little surprised that the poem received as much acclaim as it did, in that day, when it all seems so in your face - but maybe that's the modern me asserting that it is obvious, when a Victorian person might have no inkling of what was going on barely below the surface. So many references like "They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray" sprinkled everywhere - as a modern gay man, it doesn't seem so scandalous or titillating to me even if you read it loud and clear, though again, to a gay man at that time, it might have been incredibly thrilling to see even a veiled reference to men's bodies.
And speaking of men's bodies - the woman gazing, joining them in the water in her imagination - also seems to couch the act of looking at men in a palatable though still scandalous context - here, a woman takes the revolutionary action of looking and desiring men, and becomes the barely more acceptable stand-in for a man who looks at men.
There's a lot of "looking" in this poem, it seems to me - observing, wondering, witnessing - which in a way, was then - is still - perhaps a revolutionary act. So often we are encouraged to be the actors, to value action and certainty - a kind of arrogant "wholeness" - which does not admit to the need or desire to observe and assimilate new ways of thinking and seeing, but rather, to impose our way on others. Even our biggest "spectacles" - for example, American football - are not about creativity, but strategy, and the brute force of combat. "The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat." Uncle Walt is showing us another way.
I adore all of Whitman--and spent years teaching him.
Here is a link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-10
These last three verses seem to invoke WW's spirit of the body - the City, the Country, and this week, the Frontier (but also the sea which brought Europeans and Africans to these shores.) He's not dwelling in the subatomic realm with his atoms, but he is in the world of the imagination because he never went out West, never sailed, or met an escaped slave.
Lately I have found myself very hesitant to speak about the conditions of Native Americans and Black Americans - I just watched "Stamped from the Beginning" on Netflix and was shocked by some of what I learned, just as I have been shocked to see what appears to be the rise of racism in America but is really only the opening of my eyes to the horrors that already existed. I accept people's acknowledgement of ancestral lands - personally, I was born on the traditional territory and homelands of the Tongva and Tataaviuk people. I find myself looking and listening more, and speaking less.
Perhaps for Walt, at that time, speaking of imaginary scenarios where the mixing of races was illegal and perilous was the radical voice. But it does strike me that "my eyes settle the land" has a faint tinge of Manifest Destiny about it, and that the "Land" was not in need of "settling." It was a different time. I'm just going to abide with this verse.
Here is a link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-9
This is a funny little section, a throwback to Walt's early childhood on a farm on Long Island, and in keeping with my general habit of just letting the impressions pop out, this reminds me of the Shire in "Lord of the Rings." (Yes, I am a huge fan of Tolkien.) Specifically, it just reminds me of things I've read about Tolkien, how he was affected by WW1 (the movie "Tolkien" shows this beautifully) and longed for a return to a more pastoral existence that seems to have been lost forever - and as shown in the cacophony of city sounds and sights from the verse last week.
I have often wondered what the world would look like if the whole conquering-capitalism-colonial complex had never really taken off - if we'd all gone the way of the bonobos instead of the chimpanzees - and followed a generally more cooperative path than an adversarial one. This verse invokes that longing for a gentler acceptance, rather than an aggressive dominion, for me.
Here is a link to this week’s verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-8
I'm going to start off this week's note with a note about the first two lines -
"The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand."
For some reason when I read that, and then read the 5th and 6th lines, I had it in my head that the baby was dead - it was only after I read the U of Iowa's Ed Folsom say it was sleeping did I realize that it was alive. But still I wonder: Why the gauze covering it like a shroud (or a sort of mosquito net, I guess)...? And why flies, which are traditionally associated with death and rot? I found it rather odd, and I still wonder if maybe WW is alluding to the emergence of life from death, which he's mentioned before, and bringing the full circle from the birth of the baby, to the lovers, to the suicide and death again.
There's a wonderful illustration by the artist James Christensen of an angel whispering "Mortua sum" which means "I am dead" in Latin, and it gave me a whole new appreciation for what "death" is, and often makes me think that the same place from which babies emerge is the place to which we return.
See the illustration here: https://arthive.com/artists/11714~James_Christensen/works/303609~Plot_7
There's also the wonderful lyric from Sinéad O'connor's song "All Babies":
"All babies are born saying God's name
Over and over, all born singing God's name
All babies are flown from the universe
From there they're lifted by the hands of angels
God gives them the stars to use as ladders
She hears their calls, She is mother and father..." Anyway...
After these three couplets, there's fourteen lines cataloging all the sounds of the city, presumably his NYC, which run the gamut from the sounds of tires and footsteps, barkers and jokes, furious mobs and fights. It culminates with the third to the last line:
"What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum..."
According to Ed Folsom, this is the line which inspired Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" which has a whole catalog of its own exactly 100 years after, and is another one of the great American poems, by another homo, thank you very much.
I love how this sort of "movie" of sounds and images ends - "I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart" - another reference to the metaphor of the train passing through a view of mindfulness I've talked about before.
Here is a link to this week’s verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-7
There are some great words in this verse - manifold, adjunct, immortal, fathomless - sometimes I find myself running to the dictionary to find precise definitions for words that I had only previously sort-of knew, but if asked what it means might stumble. "Manifold" for example, means many and various, also innumerable, but also, as a verb, to make a copy of - I'm reminded of the metaphor of grass that he has been using, how we are all "more alike than not" and it is our similarities which reinforce our shared humanity. "Adjunct" means supplementary to something else, or even subordinate - but here Walt refuses to admit that he is an adjunct to the earth, but rather, is the "mate" to humanity, in all its different stages and shapes and forms, none of which is "stale nor discarded." He insists that we are all immortal and fathomless, and that in a sense he holds us, each and every one of us, as part of himself.
I love the idea that we are all fathomless. How often have we though we understood someone, only to discover something about them later that completely upends our understanding? Or watch someone act so bravely (or so terribly) that again, we realize we don't really know anyone through and through, not even ourselves?
I think in this verse Walt is stepping beyond the known into the unknown, and in his tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and unshaken accceptance, every one of us is part of this fathomless, immortal manifestation of something bigger.
I'm reminded of all the systems we see nowadays - we've always had them but they seem to have proliferated like a hydra with the internet - systems which promise renewed youth, beauty, big muscles, silky hair, untold riches - we used to call it "snake oil" but now mostly just "content" and "marketing." Walt seems to always be looking past these things, beyond the quick fixes and the get rich quick schemes - no easy answers, just a greater comfort and acceptance of the important questions.
Here is a link to this week’s verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-6
I just love this verse of “Song of Myself” - it’s the first time Uncle Walt really tackles the question of the grass in the title of the book in which the poem appeared, Leaves of Grass, and he does so as though from the perspective of a child, as if he is both teacher but also comrade, equally unsure of the true nature of the grass, and only able to offer guesses about what it is, and what it means.
He starts by identifying it with himself, “the flag” of his character and being; and then with the Lord, as a sign and symbol of the mystery of divinity that we can wonder about; and then as a kind of child itself, the “babe of vegetation”—maybe of Mother Nature and the divine feminine?
But then he goes on to describe it as a “uniform hieroglyphic” which Mark Edmundsom in Song of Ourselves calls WW’s “central image for democracy.” It is everywhere, among all people, one of the most common sights wherever you are, and whoever. Edmundson goes on to describe the leaves of grass as more alike than different, and reaching its greatest glory in huge swaths, green in the spring when it is newborn, and the amber waves of grain in its maturity.
And finally Walt compares it to the “beautiful uncut hair of graves” and a number of passages in which grass is shown to spring forth from young people cut down in their prime, and old people—and then, he goes so far as to say “They are alive and well somewhere” which I find so beautiful and comforting. Mark Edmundson believes the next line is one of the most important of the poem: “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.”
This is all so rich with love for his fellow humans, and with the egalitarian, democratic spirit, where every one of us is equal to every other one, and that we can be both individuals, as well as a great people together.
I do sometimes feel like we have never really completed this cycle of democratic transformation, that we are more than ever caught up in the mercenary scramble to the top of the heap, lionizing those who have reached some theoretical pinnacle—usually by virtue of the number of dollar signs amassed rather than by the expansiveness of their character.
We have been watching this documentary on Netflix, “Alexander - The Making of a God” and I just want to let that sink in—that one of the oldest and “greatest” of our historical persons is remembered mainly for war, conquest and domination. It seems to me the vision Walt Whitman presents is one which transcends this model, and still holds greaestt promise for our future.
Here is a link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-5
I’m struck by the second stanza of this verse:
“Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.”
Loafing seems to be WW’s favorite activity and mode of being, and here it reminds me very much of meditation - a wordless, quiet, unpatterned, “should-less” (“not custom or lecture, not even the best”) abiding, except perhaps for this lull, this hum of a “valvèd voice” which could almost be, perhaps, a mantra—the sacred “Om”—more of a sound than a word. I find something very comforting in this idea that loafing could be a kind of sacred activity, especially when we are indoctrinated into this regime of enterprise, multi-tasking, and side-hustling (hustle, as in, “move it or lose it”—as though simply being, enjoying the moment, is some kind of modern sin against ambition, progress and capitalism.)
In this verse, we have the Self/Body and the Soul apparently in erotic union, as equals, neither abasing itself to the other while so much of literature (and scripture) before the modern era placed the Soul at the top of a definite hierarchy in which the body, and especially sex, were placed at a sinful depth. This is a remarkable moment in the 19th century, to imagine both the body lifted up to a state of grace, and the soul or spiritual self helped down from its pedestal to assume its place among the pleasures and delights of the embodied world.
I love that in that moment of the joining of the Self and the Soul, WW gives to us such a beautiful assurance of the divine in us, where “the hand of God is the promise of my own … the spirit of God is the brother of my own” and he goes on to identify with all people as his brothers and sisters, as well as all life—trees and ants alike—and that love is the “kelson” (a shipbuilding term) or foundational supporting structure of creation.
Mark Edmundson in “Song of Ourselves” talks quite a bit about the move from a hierarchical structure of society (the feudal structure of lord/subject, or “God” and sinners) to a dialectical one, in which the Self and the Soul, or the Body and the Divine are in conversation with each other, rather than one in service to the other, as represented in this invitation to the Soul to loaf in the grass with the body. He has some interesting comments:
“In a hierarchical world, the Soul might choose to stay in hiding to avoid humiliations. But in a world without superiors and inferiors, the Soul’s humane, democratic pride can stay intact … People may become more sympathetic, and also more creative, in a culture where they can sustain their dignity all the time. They will not have to surround themselves with defenses to fend off insults, implicit and overt, from others … Democracy, Whitman suggests, is where the Soul can be most free … We need to be reminded, and Whitman does remind us, that we in this democracy are brothers and sisters—all of us, from the most to the least. We may grow angry with each other. But we must never despise each other or hold each other in contempt … in a democracy, we must strive to be friends.”
A tall order, for sure—progress not perfection, of course. But also, this stands in such stark contrast to the current political currents around the world, where anger and denunciation seem to be getting more and more shrill. I’d love to believe that fascism is getting louder because it’s feeling more threatened than ever, but that remains to be seen.
Here is a link to this week's verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-4
"Should" - I feel like the note for this week's verse is all the Shoulds of life, all the things other people are telling us are important, almost our duty to uphold, and to which WW is saying, "No thanks." This includes the "heroes" of every age, the people we are told to honor - the "Greats" - as though they were not also human beings - as though much time and money weren't spent on manipulating those images, their trappings and titles and divine rights - and as though their image in our popular imagination doesn't have more to do with our need for golden calves than who they actually were. I think WW would say the same of himself, our great bard: "Witness, and wait..." Attend, but do not worship. There is something so much more important at the heart of this poem than the lionization of the poet, which I think is true of art in general - and something all too easy to forget with our prizes and accolades.
I'm reminded of a popular metaphor of meditation, which says our thoughts are like a moving train that we watch from a point beside the track - notice each car as it is in front of you, and then let it pass - this is a way to imagine the self, not as an accumulation of all these individual cars and their contents, people, stuff, but as the constant passage into and then back out of our awareness. "These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself." At this point I would actually be surprised if Whitman had not read Thoreau and some of Indian philosophy.
But another thing I'm reminded of is the concept of "keep your own side of the street clean" - this is popular in 12-step programs, and a reminder to worry about your own life (and sobriety) and let others worry about theirs. "I have no mockings or arguments..." I've personally found a great deal of wisdom in that, something along the lines of "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt..." But even more, it's a kind of curiosity, and humbleness: "Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it." Wondering... I like that, what a positive and open stance to take in life.
Here is a link to this week’s verse: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-3
I had a vision while reading this verse of life unending, as if the child is just a limb of the parent—the same life with fresh eyes, a new day—the NOW day—and though the links in the chain (of DNA?) may separate, they remain a part of a greater whole, and become a part again on the other side. It is sometimes hard to remember that, despite however difficult and trying it can sometimes be, life is an unbroken chain of birth, joining, and procreation going back to the first proto-cells—we are all a success story, and a single, great family—it really is a knitting together of life.
I’m fascinated by Ed Folsom’s comment on the second stanza:
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
“Now” is repeated four times, and refers to inception (beginning, birth) and “youth or age” (the stages of life) and perfection (now, Nirvana?) and finally, heaven or hell, our final, illusory destination. Whitman is saying that perfection, everything we need, resides in the eternal NOW, there is nothing after now (because once we arrive, there we are again—Now,) nor anything better—right now we have everything we need to live in perfect happiness and delight. I love this. I would say, too, that in all of his reading, I wouldn’t be surprised if WW read about and found inspiration in Eastern philosophy and Buddhism (as I recall, Thoreau and Emerson both read from Eastern texts.)
In this verse, we are also talking again about the unity of body and soul, the material and the divine by my way of thinking, and how “lacks one lacks both”—they are knitted together, these two seemingly different states - in actuality, they are so deeply intertwined, we are mistaken in rejecting either, or of elevating one over the other. I think this is at the heart of his “democracy” really, this rejection of hierarchy and exclusion, and his inviting us to instead cast off our assumptions and arrogance, and embrace the unifying experience of the now.
You can read the second verse of SoM here, and listen to the audio file:
https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-2
Hello again, moving on to the 2nd verse of “Song of Myself” and this one starts out with a really interesting metaphor:
“Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.”
What are the perfumes? Books, we are told, by both Ed Folsom at UofIowa and Mark Edmundson. I’m often not great at interpreting these sorts of poetic metaphors so I appreciate it’s just being spelled out for me, and apparently, in an early notebook WW explicitly said that literature was a perfume in the sense that it fills our minds with a pervasive—and hard to resist—way of perceiving.
I think this definitively answers Jeffrey Streeter’s comment from last week about whether WW was widely read—definitely yes. He loves reading, apparently, but he has a healthy skepticism for it. The views expressed by others are not without their bias, but WW is saying we can find the unvarnished truth of the world by using our own senses, and goes on in a passage which invokes all of them, and some erotic imagery too (“love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine…A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms.”) It’s the undistilled perception through the body (his “respiration and inspiration”) which is the true source of all we know, and all of the books that went before must be seen for what they are, “second or third hand.”
I want to take a moment to also point out another possibility, and specifically, why he might have chosen the notion of perfumes to describe the literary tradition—possibly by pointing to that greatest of traditions/dogmas, the Bible. At that time (and possibly still, in the Western world) if there is only one book in a home, that book is probably a Bible, and I wonder if the perfume might not also be alluding to the incense of churches? His parents were Quaker, apparently, so it’s hard to know if he was even familiar with the smoking pendulums employed in Catholic churches, but he was a pretty smart guy. It just seems to me he’s employing here a trope very similar to the break from the Catholic church represented in the Protestant reformation—dispense with the middlemen, go direct to the source, only in this case, he’s even throwing the Bible with its “perfumes” out the window, and then throwing off his clothes and running out the door naked, no filters whatsoever. “Ultimately, Whitman wants to show us how to live a righteous life that is not based on commandments and constraints.” (ME, SoO)
One other point I found really interesting in Mark Edmundson’s book returns to the idea of democracy. “Most writing up until 1855 had been feudal: that is, it celebrated the aristocratic, the rich, the extraordinary. Whitman devotes himself to writing about the common and everyday: that’s the kind of poetry a democracy needs. We’re done with kings, done with pontentates of all sorts…He’s an American Adam—a useful term put forward by the critic R.W.B. Lewis—who wants to begin life all over.” And: “To be naked is to jettison identifying class markers.” (ME, SoO)
This is fascinating, and to me, bolsters the idea that a priest is just another kind of aristocrat, elevating or interceding between us and the divine (and in the case of the Pope, an actual king.) But more specifically, as a writer, I am struck by how much literature indeed is concerned with the wealthy, the powerful, or the extraordinary even today—the new aristocracy of democracies, the super-wealthy and famous, or just as often, the super-human: vampires, spies, super- and action heroes, wildly talented martial artists whose skills defy physics.
We continue to idolize these qualities the way we conduct our politics—trickle-down, all of the attention, money and importance lavished at the manufactured tip of a human pyramid, while the plebs at the base are gun downed, literally and figuratively, just so much fuel for the heroic lives of the privileged and self-important few.
WW was urging us to dispense with all of this nonsense 169 years ago. We are incredibly slow learners.
I love this, Troy! God, it’s true we need connection and consensus.
I wish you would go on! First and perhaps foremost, “I call it “GG” for secret reasons”, I adore you. Secondly, “is an invocation of a combined spiritual element between the self (my self, your self, our selves) and a simple delight in, and reverence for, life.” made me fall even more deeply in love with this poem, so thank you. I also took this opening to be speaking to a mystical view of existence, separation being an illusion, the universe and everything in it being one thing, and nothing goes unaffected by anything else, whether perceived or not. I found myself pausing on ‘assume’, my brain always goes to the ‘suppose to be the case’ meaning, but here I assume(!) WW to be meaning ‘what I take on, you shall take on’, again reflecting that view, maybe even alluding to morality and karma, but at least saying that ‘my’ joy, my sins, my fears and delights are all equally ‘yours’. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on ‘as good’, in that last line, if you have any…
Thanks again for doing, my dear. It’s my / your / our joy 💗
Thank you, Troy for this lovely initiative! It's always wonderful to read great poetry, and Whitman is magnificent at his best, as here.
I guess my starting point for thinking about a poem is to consider why it's a poem and not a few lines of prose with similar content. Put another way, what is it doing that only a poem can do? The opening line, which you highlight below, gives us a clue, with its strong rhythm (essentially, blank verse) with its echo of MIlton, which is picked up by the use of "sing" (Paradise Lost begins with "sing" as arguably the main verb though it's an imperative), but we have to wait for line 6 for it to arrive. This suggests to me that there is a conscious or unconscious sense of poetic legacy here. In this case, it's also a point of departure, because Whitman will celebrate himself and sing himself. He's not asking a muse (as Milton) and he's not describing the Fall of Man (as in Paradise Lost). I don't know whether Whitman had read Milton, but on this evidence, I'd say he had. And he's breaking away from tradition while acknowledging it and putting himself in relation to it. Which is very energising!
I also note Whitman's use of "m" and "s" sounds in the opening lines as well as the repetition of "myself" (with a different meaning). It's beautifully crafted; how he gives emphasis to the meaning of the key words through these sound clusters. And then there's his intriguing use of the word "assume," with its various meanings all in play here.
As you say, there's a lot going on in this rich and subtle poem - just in those opening lines. Thank you for the chance/permission to indulge myself in this way! I hope I haven't overdone it. :)
You can read the first verse of SoM here, and listen to the audio file: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-1
Thanks for stopping by my - *OUR* - little project. I hope you will get as much out of this deep-dive into "Song of Myself" (SoM) as I do. Some important notes re: Walt Whitman (WW) before I delve a bit deeper.
Walt Whitman had no formal education. He could read, wrote fiction and journalism pieces, and was a typesetter. When he self-published his first book of poetry "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 - which contained the first, untitled version of SoM - he had been working as a carpenter framing houses in Brooklyn. “Scholars say that Song is the first significant instance of free verse,” says Mark Edmundson in “Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy.” (ME/SoO for citations - I have the Kindle version, so I can’t note page numbers.)
As mentioned in the first verse, he had just turned 37, and the American “experiment” - a nation with a constitutional democracy for the first time since the ancient Greeks - was not 80 years old. The formal discovery of the atom - though also deriving from an ancient Greek precursor - was even newer.
This is the ground from which Walt Whitman emerged as one of the most respected and beloved American poets.
I don’t want to spend too much time discussing the significance and legacy of Walt or his other poetry - this isn’t a university course, and I’m hardly a scholar. I’ll try to stick each week to the relevant verse, and any details or bits of information that I glean from U. of Iowa’s WhitmanWeb project, or Mark Edmundson’s book - or other books or relevant research I pick up along the way - will mostly be sprinkled in to help me elucidate a point about how the poem and its ideas affect me.
By all means, I hope YOU will feel free to discuss anything about WW, his poetry, your own insights and research, and I will do my best to respond and acknowledge the contributions of everyone who drops in.
I CELEBRATE MYSELF…?
I just want to make note of those first three words, because this poem is all about identity, and the dichotomy between I and You is significant (“I” is the first word of the poem, and “you” the last.) But celebrate? Here are some words associated with “celebrate” according to WordHippo.com, my go-to for synonyms and such: Joyous. Appreciation. Honor. Triumphant. Elation. Jubilation. Pleasure. Satisfaction. Also: To perform a (usually religious) rite or ceremony.
What I’m seeing here is a declaration of love, from WW toward himself, of course, but in another sense - and significantly, in the evolving relationship between “I” and “You” throughout the poem - it is an invocation of a combined spiritual element between the self (my self, your self, our selves) and a simple delight in, and reverence for, life.
I have to admit that it is deeply moving to me to think this poem is a convocation of love and life, of a spiritual component to each of us and our birthright as living beings. Much of my personal spiritual journey and sobriety is built on an attempt to understand where “spirit” resides, and I am heartened to find in SoM a very powerful declaration that “God” - or goddess, deity, spirit, unity, higher power, whatever you call it (I call it “GG” for secret reasons) - is alive in every one of us.
BUT WHO IS THE “YOU” in the first line?
It’s tempting to think that “you” is the reader, simple enough, and obviously he is trying to draw us in to his ritual. But Mark Edmundson believes it’s Walt’s own Soul, which he invites in the next line. “The Soul - at least Whitman’s Soul - is uneasy about entering the world as it is. Yet to Whitman, the Soul belongs to the world. It is rightly one with the physical-every atom that belongs of the Self belongs to the Soul as well, or at least it could.” (ME,SoO)
I find this a really interesting interpretation, inviting a oneness between the body and the soul, the spiritual and material worlds, which I wholeheartedly accept and agree with - to me, they are two sides of the same coin, Being and Transcendence, the same essence in different aspects.
But I’m also still stuck on the idea that he IS speaking to the reader, and I don’t think we must necessarily say the Reader and the Soul are mutually exclusive. Perhaps - bear with me - Being is the differentiated form of a universally shared Transcendence, and when he refers to “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he means a shared, universal Soul expressed through the multiplicity and interconnectedness of the material world.
Ed Folsom’s WhitmanWeb entry mentions WW’s abandonment “...of the two main things that separate people, that create animosity, jealousy, and war—beliefs and possessions: “what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to you as good belongs to me.” At every level of our being, we are incessantly transferring and exchanging materials, ideas, emotions, affections. The atoms that yesterday composed a living cow or a growing plant today are part of us, as the eternal atoms of the universe continue their nonstop interaction and rearrangement.”
This echoes the Buddhist concept of eternal change - birth, life, death, rebirth - and how the spiritual path leads beyond dogma (“Creeds and schools in abeyance”) and the illusions of security, wealth, and power, to a oneness, an egalitarianism within individuality, which sweeps away accidents of birth and fortune (an artificial aristocracy) to arrive at a true democratic vision: we are all, eternally, One - no better and no less than each other, because we all spring from the same undifferentiated spiritual ground.
I could go on, but I won’t. I’ll try to be a little more succinct in the future - no promises - feel free to skim. There’s so much here, it’s so dense and rich, but I would love to hear from YOU. ~ T. xo
I told my friend what I was doing with SoM and he was like, "Oh! Kinda like that Julia Child movie... 'Julie & Julia...'" Hmmm... Maybe some next step will emerge along the way, I'm staying open to all the possibilities presented by the reading and the comments and the spirit of Uncle Walt. 🤍