The spicewood burns along the gray, spent sky,
In moist unchimneyed places, in a wind,
That whips it all before, and all behind,
Into one thick, rude flame, now low, now high.
It is the first, the homeliest thing of all—
At sight of it, that lad that by it fares,
Whistles afresh his foolish, town-caught airs—
A thing so honey-colored and so tall!
It is as though the young Year, ere he pass,
To the white riot of the cherry tree,
Would fain accustom us, or here, or there,
To his new sudden ways with bough and grass,
So starts with what is humble, plain to see,
And all familiar as a cup, a chair.
_Horace Traubel_
Horace Traubel, often referred to as “Whitman’s Boswell,” was born
in Camden, New Jersey, December 19, 1858, of mixed Jewish and
Christian parentage. His scholastic education was desultory; after
leaving school he sold newspapers, worked as an errand boy and
helped his father in a stationery store. Later he became a printer’s
devil, proof-reader, reporter and editorial writer. In 1873 Walt
Whitman came to Camden, little dreaming he would spend the remainder
of his life there. He was almost friendless, a sick man, helpless
and alone. The Traubel household welcomed him in and an
extraordinary friendship sprang up immediately between the aging
poet and the young boy. Traubel saw Whitman some part of each day
for almost twenty years. “As the years fled,” says David Karsner in
his Life of Horace Traubel, “he catered to Whitman’s needs in a
hundred different ways. He would bring Old Walt such papers and
magazines as he knew would interest him. He ran his errands ... and
assumed the details and responsibilities connected with the
publishing of the later editions of Whitman’s books.” This intimacy
is fully recorded in Traubel’s chief work, a series of volumes,
_With Walt Whitman in Camden_, a compilation of extraordinary value
which has been called “Whitman’s unconscious autobiography.”
It is inevitable that Traubel’s own poetry should betray the strong
influence of his great friend and hero. And yet in several poems in
_Optimos_ (1910) and _Chants Communal_ (1914) Traubel achieves a
personal idiom; beneath the wearying length and repetitive phrases,
he communicates the fire of the social revolutionist, the insurgent
who wrote, “I build no fires to burn anybody up. I only build fires
to light up the way.”
Traubel died at Bon Echo, Ontario, Canada, where he had gone for his
health, September 8, 1919.