Walt Whitman Reconsidered-II

...No poet engages the reader with so fervid and intimate a clasp...

...Or like some old crone rocking the cradle...

...Afterward...

...His "holy places" belong to the Long Island of his earliest years...

...in this sense, the first truly modern poet with epic ambitions: the first author to portray himself as the mythic representative of his people and his time...

...The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe...

...embracing him, taught him to love and he responded with love...

...Even in the evocation of the inland funeral cortege of Lincoln the ocean is improbably present: "The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know . . ." Wherever death is named or suggested, the off-stage noise of the sea is heard...

...My own songs awaked from that hour, And with them the key...

...in "The Sleepers," for instance, the daylight has departed and with it, all certainty...

...They are, therefore, the expression of what the French call the crise de quarante, the crisis of entering middle age, of accepting once and for all what one unredeemably is, Whitman is a Romantic poet in many senses...

...I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle's nest, I pass the Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas . . . ," one does not believe him...

...May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning . . . The poet of dogmatic assertion has come to rest on the tentative hope of "may-be...

...When he cries...

...It is an odd subject for the Great American Poem: the celebration (half heroic, half-ironic) of the mating between an "I" whose reality is constantly questioned and an even more elusive "you...

...no writer describes the act of reading so erotically...

...He is...

...Are we here together alone...

...it is the sea seen from the bathing-beach or the wharf (an arm over some rough companion's shoulder), the island-dweller's sea...

...Is there an Other to whom one can speak: a real beloved, a real audience, a real God...

...It is because Whitman's personal concern on this score coincides with a more general problem that he touches us so deeply, his loneliness becoming a symbol for the alienation of the modern artist and of modern man in a godless universe...

...In Specimen Days, Whitman writes: "Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps, a poem about the sea-shore—that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid...

...Even the obsessive image of merging, of unity which works everywhere in Leaves of Grass, seems abstracted from memories of the mingling of water and sand at the tide-line...

...To no other scene is the poet bound with such filial ties...

...Though, like "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers" moves from a concern with "I" toward a commitment to "you," its tone is altogether different, melancholy and subdued...

...and wrote at a time when poets grew increasingly unsure of whom they were addressing...

...The poetry written by Whitman after his 40th year consists by and large of variations on the themes established between 1855 and 1860...

...Song of Myself," though it stands at the center of Whitman's epic attempt and can be read as a heroic poem intended to define the ethos of a nation, is also a love poem: simultaneously a love song, a love affair (the poet's only successful one) and a love-child (the only real offspring of his passion, for surely the five illegitimate children of whom he liked to boast were fantasies...

...which opens on the line that gives it its title and closes, "You up there walking or sitting,/W hoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feel...

...Only Brooklyn and New York exist in his work as compellingly as Long Island...

...but this is because "Manahatta" is for him an island city, a city of ships...

...The shorter war pieces are least successful when they are concerned with actual combat, most convincing when they deal with Whitman in his role of "The Wound-Dresser," male nurse and loving consoler of the dying— a role he had already imagined for himself in "Song of Myself...

...As the hero of his poem is called "I," so the loved one is called "you...

...from the moment the poet approached his 35th year to the moment he left behind his 40th...

...May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs (who knows...

...And so land is for him also the island-dweller's land, never removed from the sound of breaking waves or the sight of the mastheads of ships...

...I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return to you...

...the poet begins "baffl'd, balk'd, bent to the very earth" and ends confessing, "I have not once had the least idea who or what I am...

...for it was the sea (we are told in "Out of the Cradle") that first lisped to the poet the true name of his best-beloved, the final secret, the answer to all riddles, "the low and delicious word death...

...I recollect, how it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition...

...I felt that I must one day write a book expressing this liquid, mystic theme...

...The strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet...

...for him there would be no love not intimately blended with death, no satisfaction for all his yearning this side of the grave...

...Unless such a "you" reallv exists there is no point, no possibility of converting private "vision" into public "song...

...The sea whisper'd me...

...His poems are at once a prayer for such a union and that imaginary orgasm itself...

...and their vague pronomial romance is the thematic center of "Song of Myself...

...Whitman does not find waiting for him a body of legend and mythicized history, already known to the whole community for which he writes...

...A professor at Montana State University, Fiedler is author of An End to Innocence...

...It permits the emergence of another pair of symbols or "myths...

...The revelation comes like an ecstacy...

...His pose of being a popular poet, the bard of the common man, fooled neither him nor the common man, and must not deceive the unwary reader...

...He may never have held in a final embrace a human lover, but the sea...

...You whoever you are"—this must be surely the most compulsively repeated four-word phrase in Leaves of Grass...

...Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood I haunted the shores...

...That is why to write at all required of him an act of faith, faith that a real "you" existed somewhere...

...Not only in the crucial central section of Leaves of Grass called "Sea-Drift," but throughout the long poem, the sea intrudes in image and sound, the sea as Great Mother presiding over dying and being born...

...Unlike Homer and Dante...

...Whitman could not assume a certain class of reader, but had to create his own public even as he had to create his own themes...

...Like most modern poets, he addressed and continues to address a shrinking and uncertain audience...

...At any rate, the crisis of his own middle age remained always realer for Whitman as a poet than the great national crises of secession and war...

...I cross the Laramie plains...

...It is, then, a poem of faith, its doubts incidental and repressed...

...I note the rocks in grotesque shapes, the buttes...

...The latter pronoun in Whitman's verse almost always is followed by the phrase "whoever you are...

...most often as a second self, '"the real Me") could he enter into an orgasmic unity...

...It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms...

...He lived, after all...

...and that faith he desperately sustained...

...Whitman could not even live (much less write) anything he had not already set down in the work from which he could not disentangle his aging self...

...I stop somewhere waiting for you...

...They define for him that small span of authentic experience, which (though it cover only a few years, months, even days) means more to a writer than the whole stretch of non-significant life which frames it...

...and the meanings of "you" (you, lover, whom I fancy—you, poem, which my fancy has created) have grown even more complex...

...but he is not...

...This terrible truth his heart had guessed (he tells us in "Out of the Cradle") even as a child...

...THE dissolution in doubt of the "I" and "you" does more for Whitmans poetry, however, than turn it in the direction of self-mockery or pseudo-Buddhist metaphysics...

...a caress ("laving me softly all over") : for if Whitman is the singer of the death of love, he is also the singer of the love of death...

...The poet begins "wandering and confused, lost to myself," and ends seeking through his dreams the embrace of a "you" who is not this time the Great Camerado, but the Great Mother: the darkness out of which his "I" has emerged and to which it must return...

...Is it night...

...Whitman is an urban poet as surely as Baudelaire or T. S. Eliot, but even more deeply a poet of beaches and harbors...

...The final verses are thoroughly ambiguous, referring at once to God (whoever that may be) and "this phantom looking down," which is to say, the poet's "real Me," that he imagines eluding him, "untouched, untold, altogether unreach'd,/Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,/ With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written . . ." There is no elation this time, no boasting however hysterical...

...for it embodies a riddle which torments the poet even more than that of the Self: the riddle of the Other...

...The almost pathological self-pity projected in such stories, the fear of authority and the desperate identification with ihe misunderstood child are a clue to all of Whitman's work: but it is not till his youth is over that he is able to make of such symptoms works of art...

...Normally, the vividly experienced moments on which the poet feeds throughout his career belong to childhood and adolescence: to the golden age before the natural scene has lost its primal magic...

...This is the second of two articles based on Leslie Fiedler's introduction to his selection from the work of Walt Whitman, which will be published this month under the title, Whitman, by the Dell Publishing Company in their paperback Laurel Poetry Series (General Editor: Richard Wilbur...

...and at the center of that personal crisis is a crushing sense of loneliness, of being unloved...

...Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears, I jeel immerged from head to foot, Delicious, enough...

...What the Hill of Howth and the River Liffey are to James Joyce or the Mississippi to Mark Twain, Coney Island and Rockaway...

...after his 40th year...

...I accept Reality and I dare not question it . . ." "The Lord will be there and wait till I come . . ." In other poems, however, this faith falters or is utterly lost...

...His ocean does not, like the watery desert of Melville's imagining, lave only exotic shores...

...Only with the creatures of his fancy, with an imagined "you" (sometimes conceived as a lost lover...

...But what happens to the love affair of "I" and "you" when the "I" threatens to dissolve into the mystery of Being...

...He has obviously worked it all up out of guide-book or gazetteer...

...There is...

...but that there would never be for him any stable, continuing relationship either with male or female...

...After the initial, existential nausea ("Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death"), the poet of many masks and poses finds a kind of amusement in conceiving of all life as a cosmic hoax ("Have you no thought 0 dreamer that it may all be maya, illusion...

...We are not surprised when in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" the middle-aged poet, remembering the child he was...

...My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite," the poet insists...

...Cross out please," he cries, making a virtue of a necessity, "those immensely overpaid account,/That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wandering . . ." His essential mythology is not even provided by the American past...

...indeed, a disturbing vagueness about the former poem, a sense that its occasion is only nominal, that it mourns someone or something only accidentally represented by Lincoln...

...When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," in the main merely recapitulates the feelings and even the symbols of "Out of the Cradle...

...Walt Whitman is no exception in this regard...

...sometimes as an indiscriminate Everyman...

...It is not out of simple vanity, by any means, or without self-mockery that Whitman attempts in Leaves of Grass his odd autobiographical Epic, his mythicized Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Hero...

...Hampton and Montauk are to Whitman...

...like most Romantics, a poet of adolescence—except as the nostalgia of adolescence in him survives and blends into the disenchantment of middle-age...

...It provides a transition to the third of the great I-you poems, "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life...

...the word up from the waves, The word of the sweetest song and all songs...

...Indeed, the play of illusion and reality, the teasing search for and the trifling with the "real Me," "the real real," "the real of the real," becomes a major theme of Whitman's poetry, a theme on which the last word is spoken in the poem Whitman himself chose to stand at the end of his book, "Good-Bye My Fancy...

...therefore, himself...

...I remember well...

...There are many landscapes in Leaves of Grass, evocations of mountain and plain, the South and the West— the whole breadth of Amerioa...

...calls them his mother and his father...

...at a moment when some thinkers were declaring the death of God...

...he asks his reader, tipping his own hand...

...To anyone dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door . . . Let the physician and the priest go home . . . I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs . . . It is as if...

...often as the reader...

...The Civil War and especially the death of Lincoln provided him with what seem new subjects for yerse: but even that remarkable threnody...

...But who is the poet's beloved, the Beatrice he could never leave off wooing, the Penelope to whom he could never return...

...Of this he is quite aware...

...Shipwreck and windrows are for him the natural symbols of terror and grace...

...In the years between 1855 and 1860, he apparently came to realize more and more clearly that not only would he never get married (he probably never experienced any deep heterosexual love...

...Everything essential to Whitman is the gift of the ocean, cast up even as he was cast up (mama's boy to the end) by the "fierce old mother...

...When he deserts such sanctuaries for other places, he becomes abstract, forced, false...

...Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you...

...sometimes as a perfect "Camerado," God...

...concerned with death and the vanity of ambition...

...Most of his earliest writing is in prose, chiefly newspaper stories, but also a temperance novel and a handful of shorter fictions centering around fantasies of children beaten, abused and murdered...

...The sea and the shore: These are more, then, than settings: they are the essential themes, the deep shadowy protagonists of the work which Whitman never quite wrote but of which all his writing is a projection...

...swathed in sweet garments, bending aside...

...It is well to remember that the key poems of Whitman's book were written from sometime just before 1855 to 1360, that is...

...Indeed, it is as the laureate of death (not of Democracy or self-love or healing or sex) that we finally remember him, even as he himself remembered the moment of his poetic awakening as the moment of the sea's revelation: "death, and again death, death, death, death...

...and his hero is...

...Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man...

...which he himself thought of as representing the deepest layers of his experience...

...it is derived from his own personal experience, lived or dreamed...

...His Odysseus is Walt Whitman: his Descent into the Underworld the plunge into the darkness of his own mind: and the irony of this, the absurdity of treating heroically such anti-heroic matter, does not escape him...

...but only the beaches of Long Island, that "Paumanok" where the poet played as a bov and mooned as a young man, live for his imagination...

...Unlike the writers of earlier times...

...His production before his 35th year is trivial and conventional —his few poems, inept in form and melancholy in tone...

...Song of Myself" begins with the word "I" but ends with "you," a "you" believed in though never attained...