by Harold Bloom
And I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
And I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night,
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all.
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself….the latter I translate into a new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
I chant a new chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development.
Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?
It is a trifle….they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.
Press close barebosomed night! Press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds! Night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night! Mad naked summer night!
Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
Prodigal! you have given me love!….therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love!
The poet who finds no sweeter fat than sticks to his own bones is hardly going to venerate a gaseous vapor masquerading as the Holy Spirit. As the poet both of the body and of the soul, of the woman as of the man, Walt is the lover of the cosmos. Earth is his Prodigal who returns to exchange passionate love with the American poet. When, in “Voyages II,” Hart Crane cries out, “O my Prodigal” to his lover, he alludes to this rhapsodic passage.
Though Whitman may seem to be evading his Hicksite Quaker heritage, it returns triumphantly as “Song of Myself” suddenly soars upward in a giant release of long-repressed human desire:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual….eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist….no stander above men and women or apart from them….no more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me….and whatever is done or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.
Through me the afflatus surging and surging….through me the current and index.
I speak the password primeval….I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts….voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
I do not press my finger across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.
If I worship any particular thing it shall be some of the spread of my body;
Translucent mould of me it shall be you,
Shaded ledges and rests, firm masculine coulter, it shall be you,
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you,
You my rich blood, your milky stream pale strippings of my life;
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you,
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions,
Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you,
Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn it shall be you;
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you;
Sun so generous it shall be you,
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you,
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you,
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you,
Broad muscular fields, branches of liveoak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you,
Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.
I dote on myself….there is that lot of me, and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy.
There is a portion of this passage that bears repeating; it should have been burned on the American consciousness, though, alas, it never could be:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
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sp; Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts….voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
In his crippled old age, waning slowly in Camden, New Jersey, Whitman himself forgot these lines and talked nonsense about blacks and workers. But that was no longer Walt Whitman the poet and seer of his nation. How shall I convey the majesty and burning of this great chant? Part of the power is that it hardly seems that only one man is speaking. The hum of multitudes is there. This Whitman could be Micah, Amos, or the First Isaiah. The difference is Whitman’s preternatural awareness of what nearly all of us would regard as unworthy of notice:
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
No one but Whitman and Dickinson could have celebrated both fog and beetles. What for most of us is beyond the edge of being is for Walt a value. Fortified by his love of others and otherness, Whitman is able to face and overcome the challenge of nature:
To behold the daybreak!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.
Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols, silently rising, freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.
Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.
The earth by the sky staid with….the daily close of their junction,
The heaved challenge from the east that moment over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.
Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick cries out that he would strike the sun if it insulted him. Walt, superbly balanced and confident, takes another way. What other poet could greet the sunrise by sending forth sunrise out of himself? Matching the sun, Whitman becomes Yahweh finding his soul’s comfort in the calm and cool daybreak.
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.
Speech is the twin of my vision….it is unequal to measure itself.
It provokes me forever,
It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough….why don’t you let it out then?
Come now I will not be tantalized….you conceive too much of articulation.
Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded?
Waiting in gloom protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
I underlying causes to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts….it keeping tally with the meaning of things,
Happiness….which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.
My final merit I refuse you….I refuse putting from me the best I am.
Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me,
I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you.
Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic.
This is Whitman at his strongest. The crucial line is “My knowledge my live parts….it keeping tally with the meaning of things.”
The tally, whether verb or substantive, will become Whitman’s prime image of voice. His live parts or genitalia, through autoerotic stimulation, will give us the best he has.
I hear the trained soprano….she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me….I dab with bare feet….they are licked by the indolent waves,
I am exposed….cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine….my windpipe squeezed in the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
To be in any form, what is that?
If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
The onanistic frenzy ensues in rhapsody of whirling images. But Whitman is moving toward crisis:
Is this then a touch?….quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning, to strike what is hardly different from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes and holding me by the bare waist,
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture fields,
Immodestly sliding the fellow-sense away,
They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me,
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them awhile,
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.
The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless….
This returns us to the early fragment in which self-gratification is conveyed by the image of the headland.
I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and death chasing it up and down the storm,
How he knuckled tight and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalked in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, We will not desert you;
How he saved the drifting company at last,
How the lank loose-gowned women looked when boated from the side of their prepared graves,
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipped unshaved men;
All this I swallow and it tastes good….I like it well, and it becomes mine,
I am the man….I suffered….I was there.
The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and necks,
The murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.
I am the hounded slave….I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me….crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch th
e rails of the fence….my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,
They taunt my dizzy ears….they beat me violently over the head with their whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels….I myself become the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken….tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired….I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have cleared the beams away….they tenderly lift me forth.
I lie in the night air in my red shirt….the pervading hush is for my sake,
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me….the heads are bared of their firecaps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.
Distant and dead resuscitate,
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me….and I am the clock myself.
The extraordinary image of Walt Whitman as the clock myself is illuminated by the startling “Agonies are one of my changes of garments.” Overidentification with victimized slaves and outcast women is redeemed by another magnificent line of immediacy and humane participation: “I am the man….I suffered….I was there.”
I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far….it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.
