Post-election, I seem to have been keeping Walt Whitman’s “Complete Poems” close at hand, an old thick paperback, quintessentially dog-eared, the binding now so flaccid that it lies primly flat against my chest on this late fall day as I type these words.
I’m in southern California for my sister’s memorial weekend, an otherwise somber affair leavened both by the prospect of gathering in solidarity with a good part of my nuclear clan and its various affiliates, and by the region living up to its reputation as it unfurls yet another 78-degree day of balmy sunshine right on the cusp of winter.
If the word “exuberant” hadn’t been coined when it was (early 1500s, from the ancient Latin describing an overflowing milk supply from a cow or goat), someone would surely have had to come up with a version of it to describe Whitman’s poetry during his profuse creative period in the latter half of the 19th century.
It’s hard to imagine Whitman not standing in sympathy, yet standing, also, apart, from today’s most dismayed adherents of doom.
Profuse with wonder and love of the creation, profuse with lists of marvels capped by exclamation points pointing to yet more marvels in every direction of his gaze, the bard glad for his utterly bared soul in love with itself and all others it encounters, humans and animals alike, rocks and clouds and countries and dirt, none of it beneath his soulful embrace. (“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,/If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” he wrote in “Song of Myself.”)
Profuse and besotted by being able to describe it all with words, which served as a kind of magical gift that complemented the primal gift of the world itself, splayed out before him.
Today, as half the nation waits with bated breath the unfolding dramas and distempers sure to present themselves over the coming months and years, it’s hard to imagine Whitman not standing in sympathy, yet standing, also, apart, from its most dismayed adherents of doom.
Not because he sailed fancy-free among the clouds—he witnessed too much of humanity’s dark passions to pretend that all was always right with the world. He served as a nurse in the Civil War, tending to the horribly wounded in the days before meaningful pain relief or anesthesia could quell the ghastly suffering of those he beheld.
But his practice, his self-proclaimed marching orders for how he would live and think and write about his life and his country, was to reject nothing and hold everything—the whole breathtaking and crazy contradictions of the world and every creature in it—close to his heart, which seemed to expand ever larger the longer and more lovingly he looked.
Notably, the poem three pages before his rhapsodic “Song At Sunset” is “Ashes of Soldiers,” which includes these lines:
Dearest comrades, all is over and gone,
But love is not over—and what love, O comrades!
Perfume from battlefields rising, up from the foeter arising.
He wrote “Song At Sunset” for the 1860 edition of his epic, multi-versioned “Leaves of Grass,” which began as an anonymously authored 12-poem collection in 1855 and wound up with more than 400 poems five revisions later.
The copy on my chest is his final, definitive “deathbed version,” to which he gave his blessing before he died iin 1892. Let’s give it a read before some closing comments.
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SONG AT SUNSET
Splendor of ended day floating and filling me,
Hour prophetic, hour resuming the past,
Inflating my throat, you divine average,
You earth and life till the last ray gleams I sing.
Open mouth of my soul uttering gladness,
Eyes of my soul seeing perfection,
Natural life of me faithfully praising things,
Corroborating forever the triumph of things.
Illustrious every one!
Illustrious what we name space, sphere of unnumber’d spirits,
Illustrious the mystery of motion in all beings, even the tiniest insect,
llustrious the attribute of speech, the senses, the body,
Illustrious the passing light—illustrious the pale reflection on the new
moon in the western sky,
Illustrious whatever I see or hear or touch, to the last.
Good in all,
In the satisfaction and aplomb of animals,
In the annual return of the seasons,
In the hilarity of youth,
In the strength and flush of manhood,
In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,
In the superb vistas of death.
Wonderful to depart!
Wonderful to be here!
The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak—to walk—to seize something by the hand!
To prepare for sleep, for bed, to look on my rose-color’d flesh!
To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large!
To be this incredible God I am!
To have gone forth among other Gods, these men and women I love.
Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself!
How my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around!
How the clouds pass silently overhead!
How the earth darts on and on! and how the sun, moon, stars, dart on and on!
How the water sports and sings! (surely it is alive!)
How the trees rise and stand up, with strong trunks, with branches and leaves!
(Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul.)
O amazement of things—even the least particle!
O spirituality of things!
O strain musical flowing through ages and continents, now reaching me and America!
I take your strong chords, intersperse them, and cheerfully pass them forward.
I too carol the sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting,
I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth,
I too have felt the resistless call of myself.
As I steam’d down the Mississippi,
As I wander’d over the prairies,
As I have lived, as I have look’d through my windows my eyes,
As I went forth in the morning, as I beheld the light breaking in the east,
As I bathed on the beach of the Eastern Sea, and again on the beach of the
Western Sea,
As I roam’d the streets of inland Chicago, whatever streets I have roam’d,
Or cities or silent woods, or even amid the sights of war,
Wherever I have been I have charged myself with contentment and triumph.
I sing to the last the equalities modern or old,
I sing the endless finales of things,
I say Nature continues, glory continues,
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.
O setting sun! though the time has come,
I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.
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Whitman never buries metaphors and meaning in layers of obtuse prose. He sings of himself and of what he sees plainly and boldly, relying on a kind of celebratory series of affirmations to build momentum, along with an intentional biblical cadence so the reader is swept up into his vision that the world remains a vibrating, living mystery and joy.
The sunset as an end-of-day/end-of-life symbol brings him no pain. “I sing the endless finales of things,I I say Nature continues, glory continues,” he proclaims.
These 150+ years later, with notes of a kind of political armageddon in the air, one could read those lines and many others as odes to escapism, but Whitman looms too large and his message, however he might write of the world as a model of perfection, is of embrace rather than escape.
Take everything in, deny none of it, consort with all of it, fight the battles your spirit calls you to fight, but to lose yourself in spite and forsake your capacity for wonder would be a tragedy that he would lament, and a sure sign the forces of darkness have won the larger battle for your very soul.
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In keeping with Walt Whitman and the strength of self and nature, I scribbled down a few words of my own. Even in the darkest of nights, a full moon can rise. After a hurricane, rainbows appear. While a wildfire can be so destructive, it also burns away the old growth and creates space for new, more nutrient rich vegetation to burst forth like Phoenix from the ashes. The Chicago fire destroyed so much of the city’s wood structures that soon a magnificent steel skyline emerged. Perhaps, in the not so far away, we can look back on this present time and sigh, realizing we are stronger for it. I’ll end my comment with a trace of Rudyard Kipling: If you can meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same…/Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools…And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”.
A Whitmanesque entry indeed, Robert. Would bring a smile to the Bard’s lips…
I happened to be on a holiday in Cabo the night of the election. We were to fly home the next day and the TV in the room not been turned on at all until then. We had to see how things were going. Iowa’s hopeful poll turned out to be wishful thinking, and NC was announced for Trump. David Brooks drily commented that “Trump is over-performing.” Well, shit. We turned off the TV since we had to fly home the next day and there was no point in staying up all night, regardless of the outcome. I was awakened from sleep by a woman shouting outside of the place we were staying. The only words I could hear clearly were, “FUCK AMERICA!” There goes Pennsylvania was my first thought. 4 more years……at least. I’ve been strangely calm since the results came in. It’s not just resignation. It’s more like The Embrace of Everything you pull out of Whitman. I’m trying, anyway. Some days are harder than others, and there are hard days ahead, but thanks for the wisdom of Whitman where it can come in handy.
I’ve got a little laugh-cry response going while reading your reflection here, Dennis, from that old expression, “Don’t know whether to…” That woman shouting into the night at a whole nation and its approval—by a bare margin, let us remember, but still—of its self-immolation, is an image that will stay with me, even as I am definitely not signing onto the sentiment. I find myself instead feeling more patriotic with age, which anyone who came of age in the ’60s would surely know is an odd and unexpected sentiment, especially given the events of these past eight years.
Maybe it’s as simple as never knowing “what you got till it’s gone” (thank you, Joni Mitchell), in this case our democracy not quite “gone” yet but given the circumstance, all too obviously inching toward a cliff. I’m not quite sure about the extent and strength of the hope I have left, but I know it is sure to be tested in ways we have not encountered before, certainly not in Trump’s shambolic first term, in which he surely had no idea what he was doing and what he could get away with. Now he and his cabal of handlers do know, and we will see to what extent his party and the nation at large will roll over and tacitly welcome the beating it will take.
Meanwhile, Whitman rings in our ears, the ravages of the Civil War he emerged from a potent reminder of what we and so many other countries have contended with throughout history. (Hello Syria, Gaza, Russia, China, the whole friggin’ Roman Empire, et al…) And while I’m not at all sure I can match Whitman’s sunshine and larger-deeper exultation in all that is, I’m quite certain I should, when the time comes, have died trying.
I turned 74 yesterday and took time to reflect on events, both triumphant and difficult, as one often does around birthdays, New Years and other signposts that mark segments of our life journey. With respect to “in light of the election” I am reminded of a conversation several years ago with a faculty colleague not long after I had moved to “the dark side” and became a university administrator (at the time, I was serving as the vice president for academic affairs).
This particular colleague approached me on campus one day and, with sincere interest, asked me, “So what’s it like?” He posed the question as if I had moved to another planet and could share some insight into an otherwise incomprehensible reality to this earthling. (And such is the culture often found in higher education with respect to faculty/staff and senior administration.)
I took his question quite seriously as I had great respect for this biology professor and his earnest intention of wanting to know what it was like to be part of the leadership team of our university. I paused and gave it my best shot to share my experiential sense of my newfound view of the place and the people we both cared so much about. “Well Curt,” I responded, “the position has challenged me to grow my capacity for understanding and my ability to contain and embrace contradictions, ambiguity, and a full range of emotions cast my way as a result of difficult decisions and judgements that I’m called upon to make.” I added that “it is forcing me to be a person with a bigger container for handling so many life issues, and not personalizing anger and frustrations sent my way.”
Upon reflection on this conversation with Curt many years ago, I thought about “in light of the election.” Like so many others, including Dennis and the woman who awoke him with her expletive, I was devastated, aghast, shocked, angry, etc. with the judgement of American voters and with the likely doom and devastation awaiting us all over the next four years. Then I thought about the biology professor and my response about growing my container.
With that in mind I find myself looking upon the madness of our political situation in the context of the larger, more eternal elements of life and nature with curiosity and a sense of detachment, while gaining strength from family, the wonder of existence (to still be conscious and exist at 74!) and to face the follies of those with whom I disagree with equanimity. Whitman reminds us of the wonder of existence: the beauty of nature, the fact that we can move, think, communicate (we can even blog with those we’ve never met and those we’ve known for a lifetime!). It is all magnificent, and it is wild, unnerving, and awe-inspiring. Andrew recently texted me along with other old friends with a photo of him with his longest living friend of 65 years. A 65-year friendship. Think of the memories and the richness of that! Methinks Whitman would marvel at, and perhaps even envy, that blessing.