by Mary Oliver
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.
The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed... (p. 115)
The fetch of his breath and the fetch of his ambition began on the shores of this loneliness. Without it he might have relaxed back from the endless and fiery work. He might have let a little moderation into his rhapsody. Certainly he would not have been the Whitman we mean when we say: the poet, Whitman.
Darkness you are gentler than my lover....his flesh was sweaty and panting,
I feel the hot moisture yet that he left: me. (p. 109)
The erotic and the mystical are no strangers: each is a tempest; each drowns the individual in the yearn and success of combination; each calls us forth from an ordinary life to a new measure. For Whitman the erotic life of the body was all that the word "erotic" means, plus more; it was also its own music, its authority, and its manner of glazing our surroundings so that it seems we have been given new sight. James's four marks of distinction concerning mystical experience might apply without contortion to the erotic life as well. And Whitman, advocating the affirmative life of the body—I want to say the luster of the body—was at the same time in an alliance with the power of transformation. Was Whitman a mystic? For myself, I cannot answer the question except to say that surely he was a religious poet in the same sense that Emerson was a religious man, for whom life itself was light. For Emerson, it was light as clear as spring in his own orchard. For Whitman, it was that hot burning, that heaviness of intent, that vertigo, that trembling: that merge.
Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of Grass advocates: the healthy, heavy, seeded life of the soul. That such advocacy brought him criticism no doubt was disappointing, but he did not change his work. That he was called coarse and rank must have dismayed him, but he did not alter anything. There was no way he could delete or dilute this part of his cosmology. It was central to everything he wanted to say.
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them..to touch any one....to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment....what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight....I swim in it as in a sea. (p. 120)
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What cannot be told can be suggested; such is the theater of Leaves of Grass, hugely long, opulent, illustrative, intense, oracular, tender, luxurious. And you must take it to the hilt, you must stay with it almost beyond endurance, for
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe. (p. 43)
Of all American poems, the 1855 Leaves of Grass is the most probable of effect upon the individual sensibility. It wants no less. We study it as literature, but like all great literature it has a deeper design: it would be a book for men to live by. It is obsessively affirmative. It is foolishly, childishly, obsessively affirmative. It offers a way to live, in the religious sense, that is intelligent and emotive and rich, and, dependent only on the individual—no politics, no liturgy, no down payment. Just: attention, sympathy, empathy. Neither does Whitman speak of hell or damnation; rather, he is parental and coaxing, tender and provocative in his drawing us toward him. Line by line, he amalgamates to the fact. Brawn and spirit, we are built of light, and God is within us. This is the message of his long, honeyed harangue. This is the absolute declaration, and this is the verifying experience of his poem.
Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;
What I guessed when I loafed on the grass,
What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed....and again as I walked the beach under the paling stars of the morning. (p. 59)
PART THREE
Intermission
The Boat
1
I think a great deal about Shelley's boat, a little world sailing upon the greater world, to whose laws it must, of necessity, submit. As we know, it soon carried Shelley to his death, and his friend Edward Williams and the boy Charles Vivian as well. The details we do not know, whether it was the wind mainly or altogether, or the leafy waves, or the wind and the waves together, or a larger boat bearing down through the sudden storm. But this we do know. Before it happened, I mean when they left land and sailed away over the Aegean, in the clear summer air, on the untroubled sea, the boat must have looked like a white bird, a swan, floating so lightly and rapidly it was all but flying. And sailing in it must have seemed like entering, with justifiable exhilaration and total faith, an even larger, lovelier, statelier and steadier world than the manifest ocean. As, perhaps, it was.
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There are as many worlds as there are imaginers. Down-shore there rests in the restless water a sailboat; one line holds it from leaping away. Little bell, little chain, little this and that, on it, taps and clanks in the wind. I stand and listen. Its bow, built of boards steamed to a sweet curve and join, like a bird's breast, tugs against the line. What is it it wants to be? Once, in Union, Maine, as we were passing a field, five white birch trees became five white ponies. Their feet shuffled in the long grass, their white faces shone. This is called: happiness. This is called: stay away from me with your inches, and your savings accounts, and your plums in a jar. Your definitive anything. And if life is so various, so shifting, what could we possibly say of death, that black leaf, that has in it any believable finality?
Sand Dabs, Four*
She said, "The fox hunt is good for the fox." "Which fox?" I said.
***
Try to live through one day believing nothing is significant, nothing is governed by the unknowable, the divine. See how you feel by the end of such a day.
***
What is called definitive is, right away, a brag.
***
The arena of things, the theater of the imagination,
the everywhere of faith.
***
When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?
***
In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.
***
Every day I think of Schubert and the mystery of his six hundred songs.
***
What is spiritual about the manifest is not the part that leaves tracks in the snow.
Sand Dabs, Five
What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.
***
Does the grain of sand
know it is a grain of sand?
***
My dog Ben—a mouth like a tabernacle.
***
You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
***
The pine cone has secrets it will never tell.
***
Myself, myself, myself, that darling hut!
How quick it will burn!
***
Death listens
to the hum and strike of my words.
His laughter spills.
***
Spring: there rises up from the earth such a blazing sweetness it fills you, thank God, with disorder.
***
I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.
Sand Dabs, Six
Sweet Emerson—always passionate about ideas, always reasonable about passion.
***
Nobody ever says of a painter that he has lost his way. It is said of writers. But when one is talking about a painter one says, "He is finding his way."
***
In more than one book I have read that Blake was actually not very good at versification; in a like number of books, if not more, I have read that Swinburne was too good at it.
***
As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.
***
I can think for a little while; then, it's the world again.
***
The cranberry bog—its rim an old slop-happy red.
***
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
***
For weeks the cut evergreens
shag a fragrance.
***
And the thrush sings
like a finger of God.
Swoon
In a corner of the stairwell of this rented house a most astonishing adventure is going on. It is only the household of a common spider,* a small, rather chaotic web half in shadow. Yet it burgeons with the ambition of a throne. She—for it is the female that is always in sight—has produced six egg sacs, and from three of them, so far, an uncountable number of progeny have spilled. Spilled is precisely the word, for the size and the motions of these newborns are so meager that they appear at first utterly lifeless, as though the hour of beginning had come and would not be deferred, and thrust them out, with or without their will, to cling in a dark skein in the tangled threads.
I am less precise about the timing of these events than I would like. While I was quick to notice the spider and her web, I was slow to write down the happenings as they occurred, a concordance I now wish I had. It was so casual at first, I was sure that something—probably a careless motion on my part—would demolish or tear the web and remove the spider from sight. But it did not happen.
I began to watch her in October, and it's fair to say that, being a poor sleeper especially when away from home, I have watched her quite as much during the night as during the day
Now it is early December.
I am extremely careful as I descend or ascend the stairs.
Perhaps when I pass by she senses my heft and shadow. But she floats on her strings and does not move. Nor, I think, would she flee easily from any intrusion. Her egg sacs, all of them, are hanging near her, in an archipelago, the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom, and without question she is attached to them in some bond of cherishing. Often she lies with her face against the most recently constructed, touching it with her foremost set of limbs. And why should she not be fond of it? She made it from the materials of her own body—deft and plump she circled and circled what was originally a small package, and caused it to grow larger as the thread flowed from her body. She wrapped and wrapped until, now, the sac sways with the others in the threads of the web, not round exactly, but like a Lilliputian gas balloon, pulled slightly along the vertical.
And still she fusses, pats it and circles it, as though coming to a judgment; then pats some more, or dozes, still touching it. Finally, she withdraws her sets of legs, curls them, almost as if in a swoon, or a death, and hangs, motionless, for a full half day She seems to sleep.
The male spider comes and goes. Every third or fourth day I catch sight of him lurking at the edge of the web. What he eats I cannot guess, for the treasures of the web—which do not come, sometimes, for many days—are to all evidence for the female only. Whether she refuses to offer him a place at her table, or whether he has 110 need of it, I do not know. He is a dapper spider; being male and no spinner, he lacks the necessity of the pouch-like body in which to store the materials from which comes the bold and seemingly endless thread. He is therefore free to be of another nature altogether—small, and shy, and quick.
Twice while I have been watching, when the egg sacs have been in the unseeable process of pouring the tiny, billeted spiders forth, he has been in the web. Perhaps, like some male cats, and other mammals also, he will take this arrival with ill humor and feast on a few of his own progeny.
I do not know.
"Whenever I see him poised there and lean closer to him, he steps briskly backward, is instantly enfolded into darkness and gone from sight.
It is five A.M.
Good fortune has struck the web like an avalanche. A cricket—not the black, flat-bodied, northern sort I am used to, but a paler variety, with a humped, shrimp-like body and whip-like antennae and jumper's legs—has become enmeshed in the web.
This spider is not an orb weaver; that is, she does not build a net silken and organized and centered along a few strong cables. No, her web is a poor thing. It is flung forth, ungloriously, only a few inches above the cellar floor. What is visible is in a wild disorder. Nevertheless, it functions; it holds, now, the six egg cases and the cricket, which struggles in a sort of sling of webbing.
The spider now is never still. She descends to the cricket again and again, then hastens away and hangs a short distance above. Though it is almost impossible to see, a fine line follows her, jetting from her spinneret; as she moves, she is wrapping the cricket. Soon the threads thicken; the cricket is bound with visible threads at the ankles, which keep it from tearing loose with the strength of the huge back legs. How does the spider know what it knows? Little by little the cricket's long front limbs with their serrated edges, flung in an outward gesture from its body, are also being wrapped. Soon the cricket's efforts to free itself are only occasional—a few yawings toward push or pull—then it is motionless.
All this has taken an hour.
There has been nothing consumable in the web for more than a week, during which time the spider has made her sixth egg case and, presumably, before that, carried through some motions of romance with her consort, and produced the actual eggs. Her body during this week—I mean that dust-colored, sofa-button, bulbous part of her body so visible to our eyes—has shrunk to half its previous size.
Then, as I continued to watch, the spider began a curious and coordinated effort. She dropped to the cricket and with her foremost limbs, which are her longest, she touched its body. The response was an immediate lurching of cricket, also spider and web. Swiftl
y she turned—she was, in fact, beginning the motions of turning even as she reached forward and then, even before the cricket reacted, with her hindmost pair of limbs she kicked it. She did this over and over—descending, touching and turning, kicking—each of her kicks targeting the cricket's stretched-out back limbs. She did this perhaps twenty times. With every blow the cricket swung, then rocked back to motionlessness, the only signs of life a small, continual motion of the jointed mouth, and a faint bubbling therefrom.
As I watched, the spider wrapped its thread again around the cricket's ankles. Then, with terrible and exact precision, she moved toward an indentation of flesh just at the elbow joint of the cricket's left front limb—and to this soft place she dipped her mouth. But, yet again, at this touch, the cricket lurched. So she retreated, and waited, and then again, with an undivertable aim, descended to that elbow where, finally, with no reaction from the cricket, she was able for perhaps three minutes to place her small face. There, as I imagine it, she began to infuse her flesh-dissolving venom into the channels of the cricket's body. Intermittently the cricket still moved, so this procedure even yet required some stopping and restarting, but it was clearly an unretractable operation. At length, in twenty minutes perhaps, the cricket lay utterly quiescent; and then the spider moved, with the most gentle and certain of motions, to the cricket's head, its bronze, visor-like face, and there, again surely and with no hesitation, the spider positioned her body, her mouth once more at some chosen juncture, near throat, the spinal cord, the brain.