Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow ? Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand- nor am I now (I have been born of the same as the war was born, The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the martial dirge, With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral); What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works, And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes, For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.1 1865. 1 This is a poem which some of Whitman's admirers are fond of quoting to those who fail to appreciate him. It is hardly fair to him, however, to take it apart from his own more modest expression of the same ideas, in A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads: -" 'And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do.... Plenty of songs had been sung-beautiful, matchless songs-adjusted to other lands than these-another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and to-day. Modern science and democracy seem'd to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements -- which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means. . 'Behind all else that can be said, I consider "Leaves of Grass" and its theory experimental-as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. (I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of any thing, or any results.) 'I have allow'd the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American individuality. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant "the great pride of man in himself," and permit it to be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. I think this pride indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.. Let me not dare, here or anywhere, for my own purposes, or any purposes, to attempt the definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, in my opinion no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it. But it is not on "Leaves of Grass" distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance. BATHED IN WAR'S PERFUME1 BATHED in war's perfume - delicate flag! O to hear you call the sailors and the sol diers! flag like a beautiful woman! O to hear the tramp, tramp, of a million answering men! O the ships they arm with joy! O to see you leap and beckon from the tall masts of ships! O to see you peering down on the sailors on the decks! Flag like the eyes of women. 1865. Q CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! O CAPTAIN ! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But Q heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red,2 Where on the deck my Captain lies Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths for you the flag is flung - for for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! 3 It is some dream that on the deck, You've fallen cold and dead. 5 But I with silent trend Walk the spot my Captain lies. (1865.) 6 The most sonorous anthem ever chanted in the church of the world. (SWINBURNE.) See Swinburne's comparison of this poem with Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode,' in Under the Microscope. -I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town.... I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.... None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed. (WHITMAN, Specimen Days, August 12, 1863. Complete Prose Works, p. 37.) I saw him on his return, at three o'clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look'd very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach'd to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native western form of manliness.) By his side sat his little boy, of ten years. There were no soldiers. (Specimen Days, March 4, 1865. Prose Works, p. 57.) He leaves for America's history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence-he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality. Not but that he had faults, and show'd them in the Presidency; but honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop), UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form'd the hard-pan of his character. These he seal'd with his life. (Specimen Days, April 16, 1865. Prose Works, pp. 61, 62.) See also in Whitman's Collect The Death of Abraham Lincoln.' Complete Prose Works, pp. 308, 309; and A Lincoln Reminiscence,' p. 331; also, in November Boughs, Abraham Lincoln,' Prose Works, pp. 436-438. It is not out of place to add here Lincoln's comment on Whitman. Seeing him walk by the White House, 'Mr. Lincoln' (says a witness of the scene, whose letter is quoted in Bucke's Life of Whitman, p. 42) ⚫ asked who that was, or something of the kind. I spoke up, mentioning the name Walt Whitman, and said he was the author of Leaves of Grass. Mr. Lincoln did not say anything, but took a good look, till Whitman was quite gone by. Then he said (I cannot give you his way of saying it, but it was quite emphatic and odd), "Well, he looks like a MAN." He said it pretty loud, but in a sort of absent way, and with the emphasis on the words I have underscored.' This was probably in the winter of 1864-1865. Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land, With the pomp of the inloop'd flags with the cities draped in black, With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil'd women standing, With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night, With the countless torches lit, with the si lent sea of faces and the unbared heads, With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn, 40 With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour'd around the coffin, The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs where amid these you journey, With the tolling tolling bells' perpetual clang, Here, coffin that slowly passes, II O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial-house of him I love ? 8 Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows, And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys, And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning. Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song, Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe. O liquid and free and tender! O wild and loose to my soul-O wondrous singer! You only I hear yet the star holds me (but will soon depart), Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me. 14 Now while I sat in the day and look'd forth, In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, In the large unconscious scenery of my land 110 with its lakes and forests, In the heavenly aerial beauty (after the perturb'd winds and the storms), Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women, The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail'd, And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor, And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages, And the streets how their throbbings throbb'd, and the cities pent-lo, then and there, Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest, Appear'd the cloud, appear'd the long black trail, And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death. 120 Then with the knowledge of death as walk- And I in the middle as with companions, I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still. "comparte edge, miming facts of death |