Leaves of Grass: First and Death-Bed Editions

by Walt Whitman

  4 (p. 13) This is what you shall do: The following passage is inspired by Paul’s dictates in Romans 12:1-21. The rolling lines and stately rhythms of many of Whitman’s writings were inspired by passages from the Bible, particularly Psalms and the Gospels.

  5 (p. 27) The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation ... his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it: These powerful lines are the foundation of Whitman’s philosophy of literature: The poet must reflect his people, and the people embrace their poet. As he brought forth subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass without receiving the general support of the American public, Whitman realized he would not experience this symbiotic relationship with his readers during his lifetime (see note 130, to “A Backward Glance o‘er Travel’d Roads,” his end-of-career response to the demands of the “[Preface]”).

  6 (p. 29) loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine: This is the reader’s introduction to Whitman’s use of “sexualized” plant life. All four words are names of plants, though they bring to mind parts of the human body as well. Whitman’s suggestiveness here has led critics to hypothesize about the tie between “grass” and pubic hair, especially in the next few pages of “Song of Myself.”

  7 (p. 31) plumb in the uprights, ... braced in the beams: These are carpenter’s terms. Whitman’s father was a skilled carpenter, and Whitman himself worked in the trade while getting Leaves of Grass ready for publication. In addition to using carpentry terms throughout his poems, Whitman often includes the terminology of printing, his first real profession and a trade that remained dear to him throughout his life.

  8 (p. 32) But they are not the Me myself In the following section, Whitman differentiates between soul and self (“the other I am”), spiritual and physical Walt. He sees a symbiotic relationship between the two, which is typical of the connections between physical and spiritual realms throughout Leaves of Grass.

  9 (p. 33) and elder and mullen and pokeweed: The preceding section has been subject to a myriad of interpretations, many of them concerned with the sexuality of the passage; for the infamous “oral sex” interpretation, as well as others, see Edwin Haviland Miller’s Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself ”: A Mosaic of Interpretations, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989, pp. 59-67. The intimacy and moment of revelation shared by the “me” and “you” of the passage need not be purely sexual, however; it might well be a dialogue between the “self and the ”soul“ that is referenced in the section immediately preceding this one in ”Song of Myself.“

  10 (p. 36) there the pistol had fallen: When the grandson of American statesman Henry Clay shot himself in New Orleans, Whitman was there to report it. The ”still photo“ feeling of many of the images in ”Song of Myself was inspired by Whitman’s years as a journalist.

  11 (p. 39) Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore ... They do not think whom they souse with spray: The “swimmers” passage has intrigued many of Whitman’s readers, including Thomas Eakins (who painted “The Swimming Hole” in 1885). Especially intriguing is the number twenty-eight (or twenty-nine). In Walt Whitman’s America (see “For Further Reading”), David Reynolds provides a telling example of Whitman’s “encoded” language in his reference to Pete Doyle, with whom he began a friendship in 1865, as “16.4” (the letter numbers of his initials); there is reason to believe, then, that the number twenty-eight holds significance (whether it has something to do with the lunar or female reproductive cycle or with Whitman’s age when he experienced a particularly important event).

  12 (p. 39) shuffle and breakdown: An example of how Whitman used his journalism to inspire his poetry. In an editorial for the New York Aurora, Whitman describes butchers in the marketplace: ”With sleeves rolled up, and one comer of their white apron tucked under the waist string—to whoever casts an enquiring glance at their stand, they gesticulate ... and when they have nothing else to do, they amuse themselves with a jig, or a break-down. The capacities of the ’market roarers’ in all the mystery of a double shuffle, it needs not our word to endorse“ (1842).

  13 (p. 43) must sit for her daguerreotype: In the middle of this collage of everyday life, Whitman introduces one of his fascinations: the new and popular art of photography. Starting in the 1840s, daguerreotype studios lined Broadway. Matthew Brady and Gabriel Harrison were among the best, and Whitman’s favorites. Whitman was allegedly the most photographed nineteenth-century American poet; more then X images of him are available at the Walt Whitman Archive (see ”For Further Reading“).

  14 (p. 43) The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips: Opium use was at an all-time high in Whitman’s New York, particularly in slum areas such as Five Points. Though there is no evidence that Whitman ever experimented with opium, he certainly saw it in use. Whitman had a fear of addictions that may be rooted in his father’s alleged alcoholism; the poet was active in the popular Temperance Movement through the early 1840S.

  15 (p. 47) I cock my hat as I please indoors or out: From his own cocky image on the frontispiece of Leaves of Grass, to his order in the ”[Pref ace]“ to ”take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,“ Whitman defied the polite conventions of hat wear of his day. Clothes did indeed make the man, according to Whitman: For him, the reflection of the inner self in outer wear was analogous to the connection between the spiritual and the physical.

  16 (p. 52) Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos: This line, approximately halfway into the first poem in the 1855 First Edition of Leaves of Grass, is the poet’s first use of his name. Thus one can identify the ”anonymous“ author only if one has read into the heart of the poem—a point that calls into question whether some reviewers had actually read ”Song of Myself “ in its entirety (in the New York Tribune of July 23, 1855, Charles A. Dana writes of ”our nameless bard“).

  17 (p. 52) Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!: These lines appear on the title page of the City Lights edition of Allen Ginsberg’s X poem ”Howl,“ a poem meant to respond to and extend Whitman’s message 100 years after the First Edition of Leaves of Grass.

  18 (p. 56) I hear the bravuras of birds: Throughout this passage, Whitman ”hears“ traditional musical instruments and sounds in nature. Thus he also listens to the fish-pedlars’ “recitative” (a term normally reserved for opera singers), the anchor-lifters’ ”refrain“ (or repeated chorus), and the drum-like ”solid roll of the train.”

  19 (p. 58) I have instant conductors all over me ... lead it harmlessly through me: Whitman’s idea here is inspired by his knowledge of such popular pseudosciences as the study of animal magnetism, a phenomenon in which electrical impulses flow through the body.

  20 (p. 63) Where triphammers crash .... where the press is whirling its cylinders: In this line, Whitman includes references to the art of printing. These are wonderfully appropriate to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which he helped typeset.

  21 (p. 63) or a good game of base-ball: Whitman was a fan of the new sport, the rules and features of which were standardized in the 1840S by members of the New York Knickerbocker Club. Though the birthplace of baseball is still in question, many argue that it was Whitman’s beloved Brooklyn.

  22 (p. 67) the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and death chasing it up and down the storm : On December 22, 1853, the ship San Francisco set sail for South America; from December 23 to January 5 it was rudderless. Many lost their lives. Whitman probably read about this event in the New York Tribune of January 21, 1854.

  23 (p. 68) I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken: As a journalist in the 1840S, Whitman was well aware of the terrible fires that ravaged Manhattan throughout that decade. In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of February 2.4, 1847, he described a scene to which he had been an eyewitness: ”When my eyes caught a full view of it, I beheld a space of several lots, all covered with smoldering ruins, mortar, red hot embers, piles of smoking, half-burnt walls—a sight to turn a man’s heart sick.... the mo
st pitiful thing in the whole affair was the sight of shivering women, their eyes red with tears, and many of them dashing wildly through the crowd, in search, no doubt, of some member of their family, who, for what they knew, might be burned in smoking ruins near by.”

  After September 11, 2001, this “Song of Myself” passage appeared on numerous firehouse doors in New York City, as a tribute to firefighters killed in the line of duty.

  24 (p. 69) I tell not the fall of Alamo: Whitman’s years as a newspaper reporter continue to flavor this section, which tells a lesser-known tale of a bloodier battle than the battle of the Alamo, which ended on March 6, 1836. In late March of that year some 400 Americans were murdered after they surrendered to the Mexicans near Goliad, Texas.

  25 (p. 70) Did you read in the seabooks of the oldfashioned frigate-fight?: Whitman here describes a Revolutionary War sea battle that took place on September 23, 1779, between the American ship the Bon homme Richard and the British Serapis. He was interested in preserving important moments in American history in his poem.

  26 (p. 76) Magnifying and applying come I: In this bold passage, the poet claims that gods and priests have made too little of the divinity of man. Whitman’s self-education in world religions is evinced by this passage, which runs through the names of gods from Jehovah to Manito (an Algonquin god), Odin (the chief Norse deity), and Mexitli (an Aztec war god).

  27 (p. 78) Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking: For an earlier version of this passage, see “The House of Friends” (p. 739). The early version was first published in the New York Tribune of June 14, 1850.

  28 (p. 83) And slept while God carried me through the lethargic mist, / And took my time.... and took no hurt from the foetid carbon: Whitman had read enthusiastically about pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory in the years leading up to Leaves of Grass. “Lethargic mist” and “foetid carbon” are references to pre-human ages, earlier even than the period of “monstrous sauroids” (Whitman probably means dinosaurs) he refers to in the next few lines.

  29 (p. 90) I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world: The title of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1955), written 100 years after the publication of Leaves of Grass, was inspired by this line.

  30 (p. 91) I stop some where waiting for you: The lack of end punctuation here is intentional, as the poem and its message were not supposed to have an end. The last word “you” circles back to the first word (“I”), as Whitman’s personal epic continues as the reader’s own.

  31 (p. 91) I pass so poorly with paper and types: Whitman begins “[A Song of Occupations]” with allusions to his own first occupation in the printing industry. When he first wrote the poem, he was engaged in newspaper publishing and would continue to be—hence the “unfinished business” of “cold types” and “wet paper.”

  32 (p. 101) Woman in your mother or lover or wife: This is one of many examples in which Whitman ties femaleness with motherhood first but leaves out references to a father figure as far as masculinity is concerned. See also the body-skimming passage at the end of “I Sing the Body Electric” (p. 254), in which Whitman looks at the male form in detail but fixates upon the maternal elements of women. In “[There Was a Child Went Forth]” (p. 138), Whitman speaks lovingly of his mother, but his father is described as “mean” and even “unjust.”

  33 (p. 111) I am the actor and the actress: The dream sequence that starts here demonstrates extraordinary fluidity of identity. The poet is neither male nor female—or perhaps he is both. While the imagery remains heterosexual, the speaker now has the opportunity to identify his lover as a “he.” Whitman, who was gay but not completely “out,” is thus able to write about same-sex love under the guise of heterosexual passion.

  34 (p. 112) and the best liquor afterward: It is difficult to determine the precise nature of this passage, a convolution of natural and sexual imagery. But it is a moment of bliss and resolution after a particularly difficult “exposure” passage in which the poet seemed to find himself “naked” and confronting deep-set anxieties.

  35 (p. 112) through the eddies of the sea: This is the first of four “dream sequence” passages. The description of the swimmer sounds like the poet himself, who also identified himself as the “twenty-ninth swimmer” in “[Song of Myself].” This particular scene, with its shipwreck and washed-up bodies, was inspired by Whitman’s witnessing of the wreck of the Mexico off Hempstead Beach in 1840.

  36 (p. 114) Now of the old war-days: The second dream sequence evokes scenes from Revolutionary War days. In the first stanza, Washington becomes emotional over the battle of Brooklyn Heights on August 27, 1776; next, Washington is once again teary-eyed, this time over bidding his troops farewell after America’s victory.

  37 (p. 114) as we sat at dinner together: The third dream sequence, like the previous two, concerns the longing for missed human connections, and the grief over loss. Here, the mother figure mourns the disappearance of the aborigine—perhaps regretting the lost bond with indigenous American culture.

  38 (p. 115) Now Lucifer was not dead .... or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir: The powerful “Black Lucifer” passage was deleted after 1855. Whitman evokes the Bible’s Lucifer, who, by fearlessly confronting God and fighting for his freedom from the ultimate master, became a revolutionary hero for the Romantic poets. Whitman thus vilifies the slave (“Black Lucifer”) who chooses to defy his master (the “sportsman” or hunter of the passage). Written during a time when slave revolts were on the increase, the passage is deliberately incendiary. “The vast dusk bulk that is the whale’s bulk” may well be the latent power of the enslaved masses waiting to arise—though the phrase is also sexually provocative, and may have been inspired by Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick.

  39 (p. 119) and duly return to you: A rephrasing of the Bible, Job 1:21: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither” (King James Version). Here, as in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (p. 400), the darkness and quiet of the maternal womb is evoked as a desirable place to which to return.

  40 (p. 119) whether those who defiled the living were as bad as they who defiled the dead?: The poem begins and ends with indictments against those who “corrupt” their bodies and “defile” the living and the dead. Here masturbation (“corruption”) seems to be viewed negatively, which contrasts with the opinion dominating “Bunch Poem” of 1856 (retitled “Spontanous Me” in 1867).

  41 (p. 127) This is a face of bitter herbs .... caoutchouc, or hog’s lard: In these lines, the poet compares human faces with items that speak of inner troubles—a face that evokes the putridity of a vomit-inducer (emetic), the addictive pull of laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol), the hardness of caoutchouc (crude rubber), and the soft greasiness of hog’s lard.

  42 (p. 128) that emptied and broke my brother: Mental-health problems plagued the Whitman family, so it is possible that there is biographical truth to these lines. Walt’s older brother, Jesse, was eventually confined to and died in an insane asylum in 1870; his youngest brother, Edward, was mentally retarded at birth (and possibly afflicted with Down’s syndrome or epilepsy).

  43 (p. 133) [Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States]: Whitman is reacting with favor to the revolutions going on in Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Italy; they were set off by the dethroning of Louis-Philippe of France in 1848, when the second French Republic was declared.

  44 (p. 135) [A Boston Ballad]: This poem is Whitman’s vigorous and sarcastic protest against the way state and federal authorities handled the case of Anthony Burns in 1854. Burns was an African and a slave belonging to Charles Suttle of Alexandria, Virginia. He escaped on a Boston-bound ship in early 1854; in May he was arrested, and after a weeklong trial, Judge Edward Loring ruled that Burns had to return to his master. Antislavery agitators like Wendell Phillips championed Burns as a martyr and led rallies. Because most of Boston protested the ruling, federal troops were called in to escort Burns back to the ship. Crowds jeered, and
the American flag was hung upside down. On July 4 activists held a huge rally in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was there that Henry David Thoreau delivered a powerful address, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Constitution.

  45 (p. 138) And clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the skull: The poet sarcastically bids the silent, passive onlookers to glue the corrupt King George III together again and set him up for the United States Congress to “worship.”

  46 (p. 139) The father, strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered ... the tight bargain, the crafty lure: These lines have been cited in support of the theory that Whitman had a troubled relationship with his father. Alternately, maternal imagery in this poem is comforting and attractive, from the image of the Quaker mother to the “mother” schooner with the “baby” boat “slacktowed astern.”

  47 (p. 142) thirty-six years old in 1855: The birth date, height, and age correspond to factual data on Whitman.

  DEATH-BED EDITION (1891-1892)