remarks--namely, Whitman’s extraordinary _concreteness_, and his
consistent and set avoidance of abstract doctrine in the highest regions
of thought. “I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, it is
always to leave the best untold.” This avoidance is so subtle and
determined that many readers are deceived by it into not perceiving
“beautiful things well envelop’d,” and into thinking Whitman himself
did not perceive them. The reason of it is clear. Whitman refused to
address himself to the Brain alone. He saw that with regard to the
highest truths it is useless to try to seize or impart them that way.
They must be _felt_ as well as thought. To try to _think_ them alone, as
one would prove a syllogism, is a kind of blasphemy. And to create the
feeling, the direct awareness and consciousness of the highest facts,
one must proceed in another way; one must use the method of
Indirection--the method of Life and Time and the Earth, as well as of
all great Art and Literature--the appeal through sense and all concrete
experience, penetrating, far-reaching, cumulative in its power, till it
wake the profoundest deeps of the soul. Through Whitman’s pages all the
shows of the Earth, and myriads of concrete images, surge and break
upon the sensitive mind-surface of the reader--who in many cases as
little understands or suspects what their meaning and intention is, as
every child of Man suspects the meaning of the winds and waters that
play around him as he walks. Nevertheless they convince by their
presence. They wake and build up new ranges of feeling in him. They
filter and fibre his blood. And it is this concreteness, this power of
indirect appeal, which constitute Whitman great among the Poets--even as
his unrivalled knowledge of the actual world and of actual life, and his
absolute _acceptance_ of the same, give him so high a distinction among
the Prophets.
APPENDIX TO WHITMAN AS PROPHET
(_See page 77_)
Passages from early prophetic writings[9]:--
“He, the Highest Person, who is awake in us while we are asleep,
shaping one lovely sight after another; that indeed is the Bright,
that is Brahman, that alone is called the Immortal.”--_Katha
Upanishad._
“He is the one God, hidden in all beings, all
pervading, the Self within all beings, watching
“Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.” (p. 125.)
“This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous;
I make appointments with all.” (p. 43.)
over all works, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the Perceiver, the
only one, free from qualities.”--_Svetasvatara Upanishad._
“The sun does not shine [show] there, nor the moon and the stars, nor
these lightnings, and much less this fire. When he shines,
everything shines after him; by his light all this [world] is
lightened.”--_Svetasvatara Upanishad._
“As rain water that has fallen on a mountain ridge runs down on all
sides, thus does he who sees a difference between qualities run after
them on all sides.
“As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama,
is the Self of a thinker who knows.”--_Katha Upanishad._
“By the serenity of his thoughts a man blots out all actions, whether
good or bad. Dwelling within the Self with serene thoughts he obtains
imperishable happiness.”--_Maitrayana-Brahmana Upanishad._
“And he who beholds all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings,
he never turns away from it.
“When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what
sorrow, what trouble, can there be to him who once beheld that
unity?”--_Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad._
The Blessed one [Buddha] said to Ananda: “Both the ocean and my doctrine
become gradually deeper. Both preserve their identity under all
changes. Both cast out dead bodies upon the dry land. As the great
rivers, when falling into the main, lose their name and are thenceforth
reckoned as the great ocean, so all the castes, having renounced their
lineage and entered the Sangha [brotherhood], become brethren and are
reckoned the sons of Shâkyamuni. The ocean is the goal of all streams
and of the rain from the clouds, yet is it never overflowing and never
emptied; so the dharma is embraced by many millions of people, yet it
neither increases nor decreases. As the great ocean has only one taste,
the taste of salt, so my doctrine has only one flavour, the flavour of
emancipation. Both the ocean and the dharma are full of gems and pearls
and jewels, and both afford a dwelling-place for mighty beings.
“My doctrine is pure, and it makes no discrimination between noble and
ignoble, rich and poor. My doctrine is like unto water which cleanses
all without distinction. My doctrine is like unto fire which consumes
all things that exist between heaven and earth, great and small. My
doctrine is like unto the heavens, for there is room in it, ample room,
for the reception of all, for men and women, boys and girls, the
powerful and the lowly.”--_Mahâparinibbâna Suttanta_, iii. 22.
“He who believes that this spirit can kill,” says Krishna to Arjuna,
“and he who thinks that it can be killed, both of these are wrong in
judgment. It neither kills, nor is killed. It is not born, nor dies at
any time. It has had no origin, nor will it ever have an origin.
“As a man abandons worn-out clothes and takes other new ones, so does
the soul quit worn-out bodies, and enter other new ones. Weapons cannot
cleave it. Fire cannot burn it, nor can water wet it, nor can wind dry
it.”--_Bhagavad Gita._
“I am the same to all beings. I have neither foe nor friend. But those
who worship me with devotion dwell in me and I also in them.
“He who discovers inaction in action, and action in inaction, is wise
among mortals.
“The practiser of Yoga, whose spirit is purified, who has subdued
himself and vanquished his senses, whose Self is the Self of all
creatures, is not polluted even by action.”--_Ibid._
“Tao as it exists in the world is like the great rivers and seas which
receive the streams from the valleys.
“All pervading is the great Tao. It can be at once on the right hand and
on the left. All things depend on it for life, and it rejects them not.
Its task accomplished, it takes no credit. It loves and nourishes all
things, but does not act as master. It is ever free from desire.
“We may call it small. All things return to it, yet it does not act as
master. We may call it great.
“The whole world will flock to him who holds the mighty form of Tao.
They will come and receive no hurt, but find rest, peace, and
tranquillity.”--_Sayings of Lao-tzu._
“By non-action there is nothing which cannot be done. Failure is the
foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved. Success is
the lurking-place of failure; and who can tell when the turning-point
will come?
“He who acts, destroys; he who grasps, loses. Therefore the sage does
not act, and so does not destroy; he does not grasp, and so he does not
lose.
“Only he who does nothing for his life’s sake can truly be said to value
his life.
“When the great Tao falls into disuse, benevolence and righteousness
come into vogue. Cast off your holiness, rid yourself of your
cleverness, and the people will benefit an hundredfold.”--_Ibid._
“I am the Way [Tao, the open Road], the Truth, and the Life.
“Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the
kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither
suffer ye them that are entering to go in. Woe unto you, Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence
make long prayers: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and
lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall
lose his life for my sake and the good tidings, the same shall save it.
“And lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”--_Jesus
in the Gospels._
THE POETIC FORM OF “LEAVES OF GRASS”
Of all the tribes of specially _literary_ people (one sometimes thinks),
of the Popes, Drydens, Swinburnes, Paters, the Brownings or Tennysons
even, not to mention hosts of lesser names--which of them, after all, as
time goes on, and except for certain antiquarian interests and a few
passages which represent the real unloading of the writers’ hearts, will
really be affectionately remembered or persistently read? A few pithy
passages, of verse or tale, enshrining some vivid sharp experience--and
for the rest what a deluge of words! The touch on actual life so thin,
so poor, so ignorant. The society, yes, which animates itself round a
Rape of a Lock, or discusses Broad Church questions over the walnuts and
the wine, is there--but of the great world, what? A shade of sentiment
or of thought, interesting enough, no doubt, and which may happen to be
in vogue among a certain class--but of the great reaches of human
passion and experience how much--or how little? Words, words, and
fine-spun forms out of the thinnest basis of material! At every turn of
the page gross misapprehensions and ignorance of the actual lives and
conditions of life and heart of the thousands and millions and
thousand-millions of the earth! How can these things hold any readers
except those whose outlook is equally blinkered? The purely literary
work has its interest, has its place; but its appeal is so limited.
With Whitman, the workman, the normal (or “average”) man--for of course
the man who deals with materials and wins his living from them _is_ the
normal man--comes, for the first time, in a deliberate and
representative way, into literature. He comes, not as a man who abandons
his former mode of life in order to seek a literary ideal, but as the
master-workman who _stays where he is_ and uses literary form for his
own expression--and with the same directness and mastery that he uses
towards life. Hence a new era of literature--a literature appealing to
all who deal with life directly, and know what it is, a literature which
will be read and lovingly absorbed by the millions as time goes on.
We may perhaps say that in every great artist there is something of the
manner of the workman. In Michel Angelo, in Beethoven, in Velasquez, in
Pheidias, in Dante--a certain clearing for action, economy, directness,
decisiveness. The good workman wants to make his work absolutely
effective. That is his first thought. The great artist will not stop
short of the most clear and perfect expression. He will do nothing to
cloud it. In a note of Whitman’s, for his own use, we find recommended
as a rule for composition “the most translucid clearness without
variation.”[10] And every one must feel that the first and
root-criterion of form is Expression. If the work conveys the meaning
perfectly, then obviously any _change_ of form (which necessarily must
bring some change of meaning with it) will be a loss. Therefore, the
expression being perfect, the form is also perfect. The two cannot be
separated. We may analyse or examine the form in such a case--but to
propose to alter it is mere foolishness. Read again the poem “To Him
that was Crucified,” quoted in the preceding paper, and realise the
wonderful burden of thought and emotion conveyed, and then also realise
that a single word displaced or altered anywhere in the poem would blur
or diminish its total message and expression.
Is it possible indeed in these cases of perfect excellence, to stop and
examine the form as a thing apart? I do not say that it is impossible;
but it is surely very difficult. Are there not some pieces of music so
beautiful, that though we try again and again while hearing them to
analyse their form, we simply fail to do so? And are there not poems of
which the mind refuses to count the syllables. Read, for example, the
following from “Leaves of Grass”:--
RECONCILIATION
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must
in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world.
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the
coffin--I draw near;
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white
face in the coffin.
Here underneath, all the time, one feels a subtle impalpable metre
pulsing. Some one possibly may be able to disentangle and define that
metre; but I confess that I can’t--simply because, each time I read, the
_meaning_ holds and fills my mind too full. Let a thing be said with
such animation and directness that you try in vain to _think_ of the
form, then surely that form is perfect, whatever it is! The form
vanishes in the meaning; and that is what our bodies will one day
do--not disappear from sight, but so glow and be suffused in what they
convey, as to cease to have any separate existence.[11]
There is no need, to-day, to justify Whitman’s forms and rhythms, any
more than there is need to justify those of Beethoven or Brahms or
Wagner. There are good country folk who delight to sit and beat time
with hand or foot to the village band; and there are folk who only
recognise a ballad metre in poetry; but they need not detain us. Ballad
metres have an excellent and charming use and quality, but they do not
cover the whole ground.
There are two things in literature which demand expression--roughly,
brain and heart. On the one hand, mere fact, description, argument; on
the other, mood, emotion, mental colouring. As the extreme type of the
one, we have books of law, science, mathematics; as the extreme type of
the other, and lying beyond literature, music. In literature proper,
there is always of course a blend or admixture of the two elements; but
those works which express a predominance of the mental and scientific
element come under the head of prose, and those which express
predominant emotion come under the head of poetry and approach the
musical in form. Just as in music every mood has its rhythm--light
jingles of dances, lulling, swaying cradle-songs, ballad-refrains,
swelling love-songs, strong marches, or great symphonic metres
including these--so in poetry. “Wherever there is emotion concerned in
the thought there will be emotional effects in the language--that is,
there will be rhythm; and the wave-like rhythms and rhymes and
recurrences will take on the simplest and briefest, or the most complex
and far-reaching forms, according to the character of the emotion
concerned.”[12]
The underlying and dominant mood of Whitman’s poems, corresponding to
his theme, is extraordinarily vast and inclusive--and it requires for
its expression a rhythm of similarly broad and flexible character. It is
obvious that such emotions as he deals with could never be caged in a
symmetrical verse or stanza.
“I have not so much emulated the birds that musically sing,
I have abandoned myself to flights, broad circles,
The hawk, the sea-gull, have far more possess’d
me than the canary or mocking-bird.
I have not felt to warble and trill, however sweetly,
I have felt to soar in freedom and in the fulness
of power, joy, volition.”
But in thus soaring in freedom and the fulness of power and joy he finds
a rhythm and a music of his own. “I see,” says Anne Gilchrist, “that no
counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that
this rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with the fetters
of [formal] metre. But I know that the music is there, and that I would
not for something change ears with those who cannot hear it.”[13]
Whitman needed for his expression a poetical form of the utmost
flexibility--capable of adaptation to the widest ranges of his immense
personality. It is, in fact, his personality which forms the organic
centre of “Leaves of Grass.” He calls the latter (see “A Backward Glance
o’er Travel’d Roads”) “an attempt from first to last, to put _a Person_,
a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in
America) freely, fully, and truly on record.” As a work of art,
therefore, “Leaves of Grass” ought to stand whole, unbroken, undivided,
and grouped round the central presence of the author. “Who touches this,
touches a man.”--“In regard to the unity and construction of the poems,”
says John Burroughs in “The Flight of the Eagle,”[14] “the reader sooner
or later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence,
cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in the personality
of the poet himself.... When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect,
like an apple or a peach; slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops
from his boughs holding a conception or an idea that spheres it and
makes it whole. It is completed, distinct, and separate--might be his,
or might be any man’s. It carries his quality, but it is a thing of
itself, and centres and depends upon itself. Whether or not the world
will hereafter consent, as in the past, to call only beautiful creations
of this sort _Poems_, remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what
Walt Whitman does, or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no
poems, apart and separate from himself, and his pages abound in hints to
that effect:--
“‘Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens;
I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does,
fresh and modern continually.’
His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics,
formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry
the quality of the author’s personal presence with them in a way that is
unprecedented in literature.”
And again Whitman says (I am quoting from the edition of 1860):--
“I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make leaves, poems, poemets, songs, says
, thoughts, with reference to ensemble;
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with
reference to all days,
And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a
poem, but has reference to the Soul,
Because, having looked at the objects of the universe,
I find there is no one, nor any particle of
one, but has reference to the Soul.”
The ultimate form therefore of Whitman’s poems is the form of himself,
of the Soul as individualised and uttered in him. As looking at the
ocean, boundless and reaching far beyond our ken, we yet recognise in
each wave the form of the sea which gives it birth; so in reading
“Leaves of Grass” we recognise in each poem or poemet the form and
unifying law of the author. Indeed there is a singular resemblance in
the great measured yet irregular roll of Whitman’s lines to the onset of
waves along a shore--now creeping white and low in long successive
array, now madly surging and towering in spray, now lipping sunlit and
blue upon the land. Every mood, at one time or another, is there and to
be recognised--yet underneath, and greater than all, and illustrated by
them all, the law and life of the ocean itself.
While all Whitman’s poems are thus parts of a whole, and must gain their
deepest meanings and interpretations through a study of the whole, there
are some which are almost unintelligible _except_ in this relation--mere
ejaculations, single sentences, or not even so much as single sentences
(see Kosmos, “Leaves of Grass,” p. 303, also pp. 217, 218). Of these,
Burroughs’ remarks about their non-completion, except in relation to the
poet’s personality, are true in the most literal way. Of others, there
is a decided sense of artistic completion in themselves, though still
subsidiary to the total work. And it is interesting, with regard to this
subject of form, to see how Whitman gains in these latter cases his
artistic unity.
One of the most frequent and characteristic devices of his writing is
the use of a very long sentence. By the phrasing of his lines the
construction of a very lengthy sentence can be kept clear and effective,
while the meaning and burden of it can be piled up and elaborated, till
at last the total can be discharged upon the reader with overwhelming
effect. Many of his poems (_e.g._ “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,”
p. 214; or, “I sit and look out,” p. 215; or those two from _Children
of Adam_, “Ages and ages returning,” and “We too, how long we were
fool’d,” pp. 92 and 93), are constructed on this plan. They are just one
single sentence, and convey one unitary effect. Others, though
consisting of more than one sentence, are still the same in principle.
Often by repeating the _form_ of the sentence (“I see, I see;” “I hear,
I hear”), he gains a like result. What a wonderful poem is that _Salut
au Monde_, in which these sights and sounds, of the whole world, these
lists and processions of earth-dwellers, these appeals to you, you, you,
“whoever you are,” pile up, in strange surging and swelling
reiteration--till at last they break out and break down in the final
four lines:--
“Toward you all, in America’s name,
I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal,
To remain after me in sight for ever,
For all the haunts and homes of men.”
Here the picture of the immense earth, and the poet’s relation to it, is
the central motive. In another, the open road is the figure which holds
all together. In another, the Brooklyn Ferry. In another, the broad axe.
And in all, as I have said before, a deep pulsating music, easy to
catch, though difficult to define.
Often the music is that of “recitative”--sonorous, bold, free, not
returning into itself like a melody, but moving forward with suggestions
of things to follow. This is perhaps the most general and characteristic
of Whitman’s musical effects. See, for instance, that strange poem:--
“As Adam early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
How finely that might be set to music--solemn, mystic, appealing,
oracular! Or read “Old Ireland” (p. 284) in the same connection, and
countless other poems or portions of poems. In the “Ox-tamer” (p. 307)
there is much the same recitative effect, with more metrical return and
melody. More rhythmical and melodic still is that beautiful “Vigil
Strange,” on p. 238, or the “Sight in Camp,” p. 240; and more so still
perhaps, the well-known “Come up from the fields, father,” p. 236. In
many of these we notice distinct refrains and recurrences, not only of
lines, but of metres--often a return at the end to the refrain of the
beginning, as in the “Ox-tamer” or the “March in the ranks hard prest,”
or “The bivouac’s fitful flame”; often a recurrence throughout of a
certain type of line--as of anapests (six-foot) in “Come up from the
fields”:--
“But now from the fields come, father, come at the daughter’s call,
And come to the entry, mother, to the front door come right away,”
or some other sort of refrain, as in “Beat, Beat, Drums!” (p. 222), or
in “Gods” (p. 213).
“Lover divine and perfect comrade,
Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,
Be thou my God.”
Finally we have a few in distinct stanzas and set metre (or nearly so)
like “O Captain” (p. 262), or “Pioneers” (p. 183), or the “Dirge for Two
Veterans” (p. 246); but on the whole these are not the most
characteristic or satisfactory of his pieces.
For short poems held together by a distinct mood and music of their own
(even if the latter be hard to define), turn to “To Him that was
Crucified,” already quoted, or to “To a Common Prostitute,” or to those
wonderful lyric ejaculations “Tears” (p. 204), or “Darest thou now, O
soul” (p. 338), or “The Last Invocation” (p. 346), with their solemn
organ-tones.
In two of his long poems, namely, “Out of the Cradle” (p. 196), and
“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,” Whitman has by a
combination of some of the devices above mentioned produced an artistic
effect and unity which is very remarkable, and which has made these
poems general favourites. The unitary scene and landscape in both cases,
the recurrence of certain emblems, lilac and star and grey-brown bird or
sagging moon and sea, the rhythmic songs introduced of love and death,
and the sobbing melody of the surge throughout the first mentioned poem,
and the repeated music of the Lincoln Hymn:--
“O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
* * * * *
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,”
--all these things give to these two great poems an artistic unity and
distinction which single them somewhat out from the rest, and grant them
(unlike some others of Whitman’s) to stand alone as it were, and on
their own merits.