by Walt Whitman
If that would save you. But it couldn’t. Which Whitman understood: “I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying,” he wrote. He also understood that his immortalizing of these boys wouldn’t compensate for their deaths. In the prose of Specimen Days, we hear a sharper sense of futility in Whitman’s voice than in his poetry, the sense that he can’t adequately evoke even a fraction of their suffering. We see more doubt and ambivalence about the limits of expression: “No history ever—no poem sings, no music sounds, those bravest men of all—those deeds.”
Which didn’t mean he stopped trying. Indeed, there was something that got absolutely fierce in his desire for us to understand—his readers now, his readers then, his readers always and whenever. At moments, his language nearly shatters, hurling itself against hyperbole, in order to give us some sense of what it won’t ever be able to convey:
“Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds—verify it in all the forms that different circumstances, individuals, places, could afford—light it with every lurid passion, the wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood—the passionate, boiling volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war.”
There’s something almost charming in this desperate plea—this sense that if only we could summon “the lion’s lapping thirst for blood” we could get some handle on this suffering. The tension here, asking readers to get closer to some “inkling of this war” while understanding they’ll never fully absorb it (“the real war will never get in the books”), is kin to another tension that weaves through these pages: the call for a kind of negative capability from his readers.
In John Keats’s formulation, negative capability is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The capacity to hold mystery and uncertainty is key to Whitman’s understanding of the war, and key to his insistence that we experience the brutality of the war alongside visions of peaceful sparkling creeks, healthy young saplings, blissful days in the woods. Even during the war, his vision moves back and forth from wounded soldiers to white Capitol buildings gleaming in the moonlight, from bloody stumps to the finery of an inaugural ball. These juxtapositions hold an implicit statement about what constitutes democratic vision—and the suggestion that Whitman’s vision of citizenship, the kind of vision required by citizenship, means seeing all of it.
After describing the remains of the dead, their “bleach’d bones” and buttons, Whitman insists that their corpses will continue to compose the nation: “shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw … Northern dead leavening Southern soil [and] Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.” His poem “This Compost,” written before the war but oddly prescient in its vision, considers the soil in similar terms: “Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!” He was obsessed with the notion that nature, his source of joy and respite, was also full of death. It made him uneasy. It offered no easy resolution: “Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, /… It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, /… It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.”
Whitman may have been “terrified” by the land’s impervious recycling, but his own publishing history offers something analogous to this compost: not just the internal composition of Specimen Days, in which a series of “leavings” form a kind of textual soil, but also the eventual inclusion of his Civil War poems in his evolving magnum opus. The 1867 Leaves of Grass bore more than a faint resemblance to compost—more like cedar-plums than you might guess at first glance. It was a ragged volume, four separately paginated books bound between the same two covers, that offered an archaeology of citizenship: various eras and flavors of national experience. It was a collection of parts fit loosely into a whole. In this sense, it fit the times. America was a bundled collection of states, bound but strained.
In Specimen Days, Whitman offers a reflection that helps to explain why he would insist on folding his civil war poetry into Leaves of Grass. Describing his experience caring for wounded soldiers, he says: “I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is, or what genuine America is, and her character, without some such experience as this I am having.” Put plainly: In order to know the nation, you have to know her corpses.
Even as Whitman celebrates what it means to remember the war dead during peacetime—“nothing gloomy or depressing in such cases—on the contrary, as reminiscences, I find them soothing, bracing, tonic”—we sense that it’s more complicated, we hear echoes of his lyric disquiet: I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient … It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses. “Bracing” and “tonic” are telling words; they don’t corroborate “soothing” so much as they resist it. (This was one of Whitman’s great pleasures, offering chains of conflicting adjectives whose cadences strung them together with deceptive grace. It was another kind of negative capability on the level of diction itself.) “Tonic,” with its medicinal and restorative connotations, comes originally from the Greek—tonikos, of stretching—suggesting a kind of restoration that also pushes us past comfort.
Whitman’s juxtapositions aren’t easy, but they’re full of a faith that doesn’t feel cheap. Exploring Virginia in 1864, during the thick of the war, he admired the health of the land itself—“The skies and atmosphere most luscious … I should say very healthy, as a general thing … The sun rejoices in his strength”; everywhere we see this appreciation for what was robust around him, even at the epicenter of so much spilled blood. This wasn’t a failure to respect the gravity of the violence so much as an homage to the vitality it threatened.
Whitman resisted the idea that profundity had to dwell in darkness: “I, too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies … to turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death.” But he found something beyond these dark veins: “the marrow in the bones [and] The exquisite realization of health” that close “I Sing the Body Electric.” This sense of our wondrous marrow—the body as soul—offers another way into the phenomenon of Whitman’s specimens: not as a crude appraisal of types or bodies, but as an attempt to celebrate and catalog all the souls he could find—humans and animals and trees and days and nights and stars. It was an act of gathering ghosted by the specter of national loss. His exaltation at healthy bodies, his obsession with the health and beauty of the land—these fixations were an honoring of what suffering had stolen. His specimens mapped what had been lost, and offered an inventory of what remained.
I had a home full of specimens, once. I spent a year of my life living with one of my closest friends after we’d both weathered the end of long relationships. We’d both lost homes we’d spent years trying to build, and so we built a new one together, our living room decorated with her collection of globes (she is a travel writer) and my collection of old medical slides, small slips of glass with sepia labels: TONGUE OF FROG, BLADDER OF CAT, GNAT’S EYE. We loved those slides: they partitioned the world into miniature enchantments and we were looking for this kind of enchantment. We needed it. We were shadowed by the past; we needed to remember the world was full of what we hadn’t yet discovered. We needed to be reminded of the malachite in cabbages, the glow in certain worms, the doubled brightness of fishing lanterns over inky waters. How it all nourishes, in the way most needed.
Once a week we cooked a minor feast—roasted vegetables and heaping grains and spiced tea and sliced fruit—and set out candles, switched on our salt lamp, talked for hours. We called these Specimen Nights—in honor of Whitman’s collection of days, his gathering
of nerve endings—and we marked each of these evenings by choosing an old medical slide and hanging it on our wall, beneath a quote copied from these pages: Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelope and fuse me—trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost—the one I am looking at most to-day is the sky.
Specere. Those nights we were practicing seeing our own lives differently. We were harvesting glints from our days and offering them to each other, honoring what might have otherwise felt transitional or provisional or logistical—train commutes and difficult students, giddy first dates and mediocre ones, the early expiration dates of unlived futures—all of this, in the glow of the right salt lamp, also part of the mystery and grace of trusting our evolving and unprogrammed lives.
Which gets to what I’ve found in Specimen Days, and why I’ve read it more than once, why I’ll no doubt keep returning to it over the years to come: not just for its singular visions of the world—in war and peace, suffering and beauty, grandiosity and banality—but for the way it permits me, coaxes from me, a certain kind of vision too, expansive and honoring. It encourages a kind of piecemeal reading that feels permissive and forgiving.
This last time, I read it on the cusp between summer and fall, over the course of a month in which I was traveling quite frequently. I read it all over the world: by a diamond stand at the Dubai airport, on an overnight bus ride through Sri Lanka, in a concrete hot tub in the middle of a corporate Kentucky hotel; beneath the shadow of a bronze Nordic king in the dappled sunlight of Oslo’s Slottsparken; and at home—in the irritable humidity of the 4 train during rush hour, rattling under the East River, and at the counter of a diner on Third Avenue while an old woman ate cottage cheese for dinner, alone, tucked into a vinyl booth behind me.
I read this book in pieces, in all these places, and everywhere I was, it asked me to be sensitive to that place—to note its details, to remain alive to the way my body was coming into contact with everything else: that object she became, and that object became part of her. I went whale-watching in the middle of a rainstorm just offshore from Mirissa and paid attention to how it felt to get soaked—already drenched with rain, hit by each slapping wave, tasting the kind of salt I associate with weeping—and admired the determination of a woman beside me, clutching a plastic baggie of her own vomit but still determined to see a Blue, even just a tail or fin. The sheer force of her desire was like another kind of natural phenomenon beside me. Whitman relished these energies; these ferocities in our beings.
Whitman wasn’t just alive to the wonders of the new or distant; he also knew how to appreciate home, the familiar, and how it could renew itself: “I do not believe any grandest eligibility ever comes forth at first. In my own experience, (persons, poems, places, characters,) I discover the best hardly ever at first,… sometimes suddenly bursting forth, or stealthily opening to me, perhaps after years of unwitting familiarity, unappreciation, usage.” Which is why I decided to carry Specimen Days through Brooklyn one day, the Brooklyn Whitman had wandered back when Joralemon Street was still surrounded by pastures. I walked with him—or rather, walked as I imagined he might have walked, in this Brooklyn so different from the one he’d known.
I walked without headphones, without precise destination, along the broad expanse of Eastern Parkway. (Whitman was prone to praising the girth of thoroughfares; also prone to putting certain announcements—the end of the Civil War among them—in parentheses.) The trees were full of leaves just starting to yellow. What kind of trees? I’d never bothered to wonder before. I wondered now. (Later, I would look them up—all elms at first, then interspersed with maple, oak, and ash.) This kind of detail—knowing what was right in front of me—was another gift from Whitman: the contagion of curiosity, those nerve endings embedded in his transcription of the world. I sing the body electric. I thrilled at autumn in the air, its first crisp notes. I thrilled at the familiar curling awning of my favorite Mexican place, my regular subway stairs, my bodega and its many flavors of sparkling water. I felt myself turning sentimental about the season and the neighborhood—the rich generosity of each, if only I could muster enough attention to inhabit them properly. This was Whitman’s beat and passion, of course, this kind of inhabitance.
Everything turned to specimen before me as I walked: a man in a red suede jacket, an elderly guy with a bag full of rotting lettuce, a woman with bright pink running shoes, a mural I’d never noticed near the Franklin Shuttle entrance by the Botanic Gardens—white farmhouses with red trim and green fields painted around them like skirts, their flat acrylic world nothing like this one, with its bits of crumpled litter turning and scuttling in the wind, cabs honking, car stereos thumping the asphalt. Whitman’s allegiance was so firmly to this world, in its mess and trash and grit and noise; his allegiance was to the toddler boy staring wide-eyed at the museum fountain, jets of water coming up and falling down, slapping the marble.
Whitman loved the world in its dross and guts and glitter, in its everything—the tulip trees and all trees, the glow worms and all worms. The long lines of his poems spoke his urgent need to craft a lyric that could hold it all. The collect was just another word for this desire: how can I gather all of these fragments in one place? Not just Brooklyn putting on its best show—sunlight sparkling and shattering off fountains—but also Brooklyn underground, grimy and gum-caked, where rats scamper between tossed cigarette butts and nose their way into the crumbed insides of crinkled potato chip bags.
“The days are full of sunbeams and oxygen,” Whitman wrote in August of 1880, and his gaze—for us, years later—still holds this robust balance in its cadences: pleasure without naïveté, relish without simplicity. In these pages, his vision still seeks pleasure and sustenance without blinding itself to anything, and there is a secular holiness—a sense of gratitude and consecration—in this way of speaking, this way of being alive.
SPECIMEN DAYS.
A HAPPY HOUR’S COMMAND.
DOWN IN THE WOODS, July 2d, 1882.—If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862–’65, Nature-notes of 1877–’81, with Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour,—(and what a day! what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul)—to go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages,* and let the melange’s lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves. It will illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life’s days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.
ANSWER TO AN INSISTING FRIEND.
You ask for items, details of my early life—of genealogy and parentage, particularly of the women of my ancestry, and of its far back Netherlands stock on the maternal side—of the region where I was born and raised, and my father and mother before me, and theirs before them—with a word about Brooklyn and New York cities, the times I lived there as lad and young man. You say you want to get at these details mainly as the go-befores and embryons of Leaves of Grass. Very good; you shall have at least some specimens of them all. I have often thought of the meaning of such things—that one can only encompass and complete matters of that kind by exploring behind, perhaps very far behind, themselves directly, and so into their genesis, antecedents, and cumulative
stages. Then as luck would have it, I lately whiled away the tedium of a week’s half-sickness and confinement, by collating these very items for another (yet unfulfill’d, probably abandon’d,) purpose; and if you will be satisfied with them, authentic in date-occurrence and fact simply, and told my own way, garrulous-like, here they are. I shall not hesitate to make extracts, for I catch at any thing to save labor; but those will be the best versions of what I want to convey.
GENEALOGY-VAN VELSOR AND WHITMAN.
The later years of the last century found the Van Velsor family, my mother’s side, living on their own farm at Cold Spring, Long Island, New York State, near the eastern edge of Queens county, about a mile from the harbor.† My father’s side—probably the fifth generation from the first English arrivals in New England—were at the same time farmers on their own land—(and a fine domain it was, 500 acres, all good soil, gently sloping east and south, about one-tenth woods, plenty of grand old trees,) two or three miles off, at West Hills, Suffolk county. The Whitman name in the Eastern States, and so branching West and South, starts undoubtedly from one John Whitman, born 1602, in Old England, where he grew up, married, and his eldest son was born in 1629. He came over in the “True Love” in 1640 to America, and lived in Weymouth, Mass., which place became the mother-hive of the New-Englanders of the name: he died in 1692. His brother, Rev. Zechariah Whitman, also came over in the “True Love,” either at that time or soon after, and lived at Milford, Conn. A son of this Zechariah, named Joseph, migrated to Huntington, Long Island, and permanently settled there. Savage’s “Genealogical Dictionary” (vol. iv, p. 524) gets the Whitman family establish’d at Huntington, per this Joseph, before 1664. It is quite certain that from that beginning, and from Joseph, the West Hill Whitmans, and all others in Suffolk county, have since radiated, myself among the number. John and Zechariah both went to England and back again divers times; they had large families, and several of their children were born in the old country. We hear of the father of John and Zechariah, Abijah Whitman, who goes over into the 1500’s, but we know little about him, except that he also was for some time in America.
