Upstream

by Mary Oliver

  Illness, as well, is a presence, an excuse for clearly inexcusable actions. The narrator in “Berenice” is named Egaeus, a word wondrously close to “aegis,” which, in English schools, is a term meaning a note that signifies sickness as an excuse. It is an uncommon term, but Poe, who went to school in England for five years while the Allans were living in London, no doubt knew it.

  Upon the wing of such pure or near madness, the effort toward re-visioning goes on. The mind deranged, by alcohol, opium or morphine, or insanity, sees a world differently from the sane and the sober—but, in fact, it does see a world. Poe’s narrators drink furiously, and when they can get it, they take into their bodies the white powder opium; thus they lean, trembling, against the walls of ordinary perception. And thus, over and over, with “wild excitement,” they “swoon” out of this world.

  _______

  To swoon is not only to pass from consciousness physically; it may also represent a willingness, even an eagerness, to experience unknown parts of life—obscure regions that might lead one toward a re-visioning. One swoons for many reasons and from many causes—from fever, sheer fright, extreme agitation, from exertion or exhaustion. The effects of opium and alcohol alone, in sufficient doses, will also bring on a kind of swooning; one leaves the realm of the rational and the known for that shapeless, unmapped region of “seeming.” What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon. And though nothing in that dark kingdom is provable, neither can its nonexistence be proven. If nothing there is solid to the hand, it is solid enough to the mind, and upon that smallest beginning the need of the mind builds.

  Poe’s fascination with enclosed space (the brain shape) as pit, maelstrom, catacomb, ballroom (in “Hop-Frog”), and the many chambers and turrets of castles, reaches a curious pitch in a piece called “Philosophy of Furniture.” Here Poe describes, in intense and elaborate detail, his “favorite room.” The description is obsessional. Here are carpets and curtains in mute and lustrous colors, paintings, furniture, giltwork and fringe, draperies, mirrors, Sèvres vases, candelabra; we are given not only their exact shapes and colors but their precise placement within the room. It is a room where “repose speaks in all.” Yet it is not a bedroom—there is no bed here for sleeping on in the ordinary way of well-earned and deep rest. There are two sofas, and upon one, says Poe, the proprietor lies asleep. But it is sleep as Poe most sought and valued it—not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world.

  5.

  Poe’s work is exquisitely and opulently constructed; the narratives have a fascination that is a sure-hold—a quality that, for lack of another word, one might simply call entertainment. They are frightening—but not in the way that Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” for example, or James’s “The Turn of the Screw” is frightening. In spite of the extreme and macabre symbolism in Kafka’s story, both “The Metamorphosis” and “The Turn of the Screw” take place in a world uncomfortably familiar, and the stories unfold, both of them, in a terrifyingly low-key, unextraordinary way. They are, horribly and unmistakably, descriptions of life as we know it, or could easily know it. While Poe’s stories are—stories. Full of the hardware of the nightmare—graves, corpses, storms, moldering castles, catacombs—and hovering always at the edge of tension and incredulity, they never fail to thrill as stories.

  But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.

  Poe’s work opens on this deeper level when we consider what we know about his life. Such consideration is a tricky business. In our own age such investigation and correspondence is, I think, grossly overdone; hardly a literary melancholy these days is explained in any terms but those of personal grievance. But Poe’s case is exceptional. Life-grief was his earliest and his deepest life experience. Not to wonder how deeply it shaped his outlook and his work is to miss something sharply sorrowful, and deeply valiant.

  But let us consider the matter in yet another way. Poe’s inability to incorporate loss and move on was not a response born of his experience alone, but was also an invention, an endlessly repeatable dark adventure created by his exceedingly fertile mind. For Poe, in an artistically kaleidoscopic brilliance, does not write only about his own argument with the universe, but about everyone’s argument.

  For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe’s narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace), we come to accept life’s brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! that is another matter.

  In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time’s shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe’s narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe’s real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny.

  His words and his valor are all he has, and they are stunning. When in “The Masque of the Red Death” the stranger who is really nothing but an empty cloak enters and slays the Prince, it is Poe and it is ourselves with him who rush forward and batter hopelessly against that incomprehensibility, with our frail fists, with “the wild courage of despair.”

  Some Thoughts on Whitman

  1.

  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers four marks of distinction that are part of a mystical experience. The first of these is that such an experience “defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”*

  All poets know such frustration generally; the goal of creative work is ever approachable yet unattainable. But Whitman as he worked on Leaves of Grass may have been grappling with a more splendid difficulty than the usual—there is in his work a sense of mystical thickness and push, and a feeling that the inner man was at work under some exceptional excitement and compulsion. Whether Whitman had an actual mystical experience or not,* his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud. Clearly his idea of paradise was here—this hour and this place. And yet he was, in his way, just as the mystic is, a man of difference—a man apart.

  James’s other marks of distinction concerning the mystical experience are as follows, and also feel much in accord with the emanations of Leaves of Grass: that mystical states “are illuminations, revelations . . . and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time”; that such a state “cannot be sustained for long”; and that the mystic feels “as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”

  Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, twelve poems and a prologue which unite into a single work. For the rest of his writing life Whitman wrote no other verse but fed it into that ever-expanding book—that is, all the work of his “after life” was refinement, addition, inculcation. Except in the hope of better effect, he took up no new subjects, nor altered the rhapsodic tenor of his voice, nor denied any effort of catalog, rhetoric, eroticism, nor trimmed his cadence, nor muted his thunder or his sweetness. His message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he a
dvocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.

  That his methods are endlessly suggestive rather than demonstrative, and that their main attempt was to move the reader toward response rather than reflection, is perhaps another clue to the origin of Whitman’s power and purpose, and to the weight of the task. If it is true that he experienced a mystical state, or even stood in the singe of powerful mystical suggestion, and James is right, then he was both blessed and burdened—for he could make no adequate report of it. He could only summon, suggest, question, call, and plead. And Leaves of Grass is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change. All through the poem we feel Whitman’s persuading force, which is his sincerity; and we feel what the poem tries continually to be: the replication of a miracle.

  2.

  The prose “Preface” that stands before the poems is wide-ranging and pontifical. Emerson lives here in both thought and word; actual phrases taken from Emerson’s essays “The American Scholar” and “The Poet” are nailed down as Whitman’s own. Whitman claims for his work the physical landscape and spiritual territory of America; in so doing he turns, like Emerson, from the traditions of Europe. He claims also, for the poet, a mental undertaking that is vast and romantic, and a seriousness that is close to divine.

  _______

  The twelve poems of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass consist of one huge and gleaming Alp followed by a relaxed undulation of easily surmountable descending foothills. The initial poem, “Song of Myself” (sixty-two pages*), is the longest and the most critical. It is the Alp. If the reader can “stay with” this extended passage, he has made a passage indeed. The major demands of the poem are here established, the first and essential lesson given in the first half-dozen lines:

  I celebrate myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loafe and invite my soul,

  I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass. (p. 27)

  In these lines the great work is begun, and the secret of success has been given. And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature: words, words, words; example, metaphor, narrative, lyricism, sweetness, persuasion, the stress of rhetoric, the weight of catalog. The detail, the pace, the elaborations are both necessary and augmentative; this is a long poem and it is not an argument but a thousand examples, a thousand taps and twirls on Whitman’s primary statement. Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.

  Logic and sermons never convince,

  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul (p. 56)

  he says, and what would be prolongation or hyperbole in another man’s book is part of the earnest and necessary equipage here.

  The reader of Leaves of Grass, in this first section especially, is a major player, and is invited into this “theater of feeling” tenderly. “Song of Myself” is sprinkled with questions; toward the end of the poem they come thick and fast, their profusion, their slantness, their unanswerability helping the reader to rise out of familiar territory and into this soul-waking and world-shifting experience:

  Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? (p. 28)

  What do you think has become of the young and old men? (p. 32)

  Who need be afraid of the merge? (p. 33)

  The souls moving along . . . are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible? (p. 34)

  Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes? (p. 37)

  What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you? (p. 45)

  Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious? (p. 45)

  And on and on. More than sixty questions in all, and not one of them easily answerable.

  Nor, indeed, are they presented for answers, but to force open the soul:

  Unscrew the locks from the doors!

  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! (p. 50)

  “Song of Myself” presents Whitman’s invitation in a tone without margins—ecstasy, mysticism, urgency, seducements, open arms, and all those questions leave the reader plundered, exalted, and exhausted.

  _______

  And so, amazingly, begins the long descent. The eleven poems remaining are various in tone and intention. In comparison with the sixty-two pages of “Song of Myself,” each is surprisingly brief. In each section the author of “Song of Myself” continues to speak, but more comfortably, less extensively, less urgently, and at an increasing emotional distance from us.

  Two of the poems are eleven pages long, another two are seven pages in length, the last seven are all four pages long or less.* If “The Sleepers” is almost palpably caressing, if “There Was a Child Went Forth” is flawlessly tender, if “A Boston Ballad” stands in its place with a surprising theatricality, still none of them measures anywhere near “Song of Myself,” with its thunder and its kisses and its implications. So hot is the fire of that poem, so bright its transformative power, that we truly need, and Whitman knew it, each of the slow, descending chords that follow. There is a madness born of too much light, and Whitman was not after madness nor even recklessness, but the tranquility of affinity and function. He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man’s inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.

  3.

  One day as I wrestled with that long opening poem, the complaint burst from me: With Whitman it’s opera, opera, opera all the time! I shouted, in something very like weariness.

  It is true. For long stretches Whitman’s tone of summoning and import is unalleviated. But it is necessary to his purpose, which is so densely serious. Neither whimsy nor the detailed and opulent level of fun-terror, as Poe for example employs it, is found in Whitman. Poe understood the usefulness of entertainment and employed it, although he too was dead serious. Whitman did not, nor even the expansions of narrative. In “Song of Myself” and in passages beyond as well are page after page of portrait and instance; each opens in a blink and shuts on another. They are not stories; they are glances, possibilities. They are any of us, almost, in another life, and they expect of the reader a costly exchange; we cannot glide here upon narrative but must imaginatively take on other destinies:

  The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,

  The carpenter dresses his plank . . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp. . . . (p. 39)

  The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly. . . . (p. 41)

  The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm. . . .

  The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar. . . .

  The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case. . . . (p. 39)

  All are unforgettable, even, or especially:

  . . . the little child that peeped in at the door and then drew back and was never seen again. . . . (p. 78)

  Along with such portraits and moments of quickness and essence, Whitman turned upon the least detail of the manifest world such a fussy and diligent attention that the long lines lay down not so much ethereal as palpable. These lines with their iambic cadence and their end stops are like speech, yet not quite. They lack what speech so readily has—an uncertainty, a modesty, a feeling of attempt toward expression rather than reiterated exactitude. Which is what Whitman has in such abundance: certitude, and a centering clarity of the least object.


  Still, for all its intensity, Whitman’s work is grammatically reasonable and abides by established rules. Such grammar-stability, compared for example with the syntactical compressions risked by Hopkins, makes a poetic line that is understandable, supple, and reliable. Such reliability assists Whitman’s capacity to stay mild, or to flare, as the need may be. His style is made up of many elements but is not complex. The tones are various: vatic, tender, patriotic, journalistic, impassioned, avuncular, sensual. Insistence and excess are not naturally virtues, but Whitman makes them virtues in the service of his purpose.

  Certain understandings still slip the search: How does the tender not become mincing? How does authority avoid pomp? How does cadence repeated and repeated summon rather than lull?

  Most writing implies a distant, possible, even probable audience of a few or of many. Leaves of Grass assumes an intimate audience of one—one who listens closely to the solitary speaker. That is, to each reader the poem reaches out personally. It is mentoring, it is concerned; it is intimate. It contains the voice of the teacher and the preacher too, but it extends beyond their range. “Touch is the miracle,” Whitman wrote in one of his workbooks. The words, in the long lines of Leaves of Grass, as near as words can be, are a spiritual and a physical touching.

  4.

  A great loneliness was Whitman’s constant companion, his prod, his necessary Other. One sees it everywhere in his personal life, his professional life, his beautifying portrayals of young men, his intense and prolonged references to the body’s joy. It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty. Thus Whitman: grown man, lonely man. Sexual longing is the high note in the funneled-forth music of easy companionship with carriage drivers, sailors, wharf roughs, loose male energy, electric and swaggering. What else can we say? What else can we know? That it was not a trivial loneliness, or a passing loneliness, or a body loneliness only, but a loneliness near fatal.