by Lewis Hyde
In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!
Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering …
“To arms!”—this is an unusual note of quahaug-consciousness in “Song of Myself.” Whitman wants to harden himself. Why? Because at this moment in the poem sympathy has drawn him toward the dying and the empty. They enter his body: he is a convict handcuffed in prison, he is a child arrested for stealing:
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at
the last gasp,
My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me
people retreat.
Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in
them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.
This is dangerous. It is one thing to sympathize with the sick, but quite another to be infected with cholera. It is one thing to accept the perishing that leads to rebirth, and quite another to suffer the dead-end death in which the soul is lost. As D. H. Lawrence pointed out in his essay on Whitman, the leper hates his leprosy: to sympathize with him means to join in his hatred, not to identify with the disease. Here pride demands the assertion of the self against the outer object. Or better, it calls for a bestowal, an out-breathing, of the contents of the self, not a new infusion. The beggar holding out his hat has nothing to offer the self. It is he who needs to be filled—with food, matter, flux, a shot of the spirit. In short, the terms of the poem must change. Sympathy is insufficient. The next lines are unique in Whitman:
Enough! enough! enough!
Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back! …
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of
the bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own
crucifixion and bloody crowning.
I remember now,
I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to
it, or to any graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.
I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession …
“Song of Myself” is not a highly organized poem, but to my mind it draws a certain coherence from a series of three “passions.” In the first of these (Section 5) the invited soul makes love to the poet. He comes to life. A long “in the world” section follows in which an essentially passive self suffers an escalating series of identities which culminate in the second passion (Sections 28 and 29—the touch that ends in the new sprouts). Another “in the world” section follows, this one closing with the beggar holding out his hat, and then the final passion (Section 38, just quoted). Whitman drops the sympathetic voice and takes up the voice of a rising spirit (Christ come from the grave or—in the first edition—as ascending dervish: “I rise extatic through all … / The whirling and whirling is elemental within me”).
He asserts an identity: “I resume the overstaid fraction” (“staid” in the sense of “fixed”—he speaks from the part of the self that says “I am eternal” rather than the part that accepts decay). He dissociates himself from “the mockers and insults.” He becomes a character, a personality, an individual capable of giving off energy and vitalizing others. The idleness and passivity that mark the first half of the poem fall away after this scene; he is active now, a teacher and a lover. He fathers children, he heals the sick and strengthens the weak (“Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you”). He doesn’t actually raise the dead, but he calls the moribund back from the lip of the grave:
To anyone dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of
the door, …
I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless
will,
O despairer, here is my neck,
By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole
weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath …
Our enthusiast has exhaled at last. He who absorbed the proffered world for a thousand lines now gives it all away. “Anything I have I bestow.”
Whitman describes the being that gives itself away in a variety of images. It exhales a divine nimbus, it gives off auras and aromas (including “the scent of these armpits”), it is “electric” or “magnetic,” its eyes flash with a light more penetrating than the sun, it “jets” the “stuff” of love*—and finally, it speaks or sings or “utters poems.” This last, the poetry, is, of course, the emanation of the gifted self to which we shall attend here. But before doing so, I want to offer a brief biographical note on Whitman bestowing himself in love. The story will lead us back to our topic, the poetry as a gift, because in order to bestow his work, Whitman will set out to establish a gift-relationship with his reader, a love-relationship, really: “This [the poem] is the touch of my lips to yours … this is the murmur of yearning.” Some specifics from Whitman’s life will help us clarify the terms under which he courts his reader, and will anchor our analysis against some of our singer’s loftier claims.
The basic fact is that Whitman was a man disappointed in love. A close reading of the poems collected as Children of Adam and Calamus tells us quite a bit. The former group, intended to express “the amative love of women,” are not convincing. As in those churches in which sex is tolerated only as an instrument of procreation, it is a persistent quirk of Whitman’s imagination that heterosexual lovemaking always leads to babies. His women are always mothers. No matter how graphically Whitman describes “the clinch,” “the merge,” within a few lines out pops a child. This has the odd effect of making Whitman’s sexually explicit poems seem abstract: they have no emotional nuance, just biology. The women are not people you would know, nor anyone you feel Whitman knew.
But the Calamus poems are true love poems. They include all the feelings of love, not just attraction, excitement, and satisfaction, but disappointment, and even anger. They were written between 1856 and 1860 by a man who had extended his heart to someone and was waiting, in doubt, to see what might happen. His love was not returned, it seems—Whitman states it directly twice and nothing contravenes the impression:
Discouraged, distracted—for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me.
I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d; Yet out of that I have written these songs.
We don’t know what went wrong, but Whitman clearly didn’t get what he wanted. One of the finest of the Calamus poems presents Whitman’s “leaves” in a new context, that of loneliness and love:
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the
branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous
leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves
standing alone there without its friend near, for I
knew I could not …
The pride out of which Whitman utters poems is not a solitary self-containment. It is active and self-assured, but it is also continuous with the other phases of the self. Just as he enters the gifted state when the lover takes his hand, so the poems come to him when his friend is near. And their utterance is directed outward, a gift meant to “inform” another self. That, at least, is the ideal—described in the poetry and desired in the life.
But we must set the live-oak of this poem beside another tree found in a journal entry from the summer of 1870. At the time Whitman was in love with a young man named Peter Doyle. The relationship proved to be one of the most satisfying of his life, but that summer Whitman was troubled. Disguising the entry by referring to Doyle as “her” and replacing his initi
als with an alpha-numeric code, Whitman records, first, a resolution to cool his ardor.
TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from this present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless undignified pursuit of 164—too long, (much too long) persevered in,—so humiliating … Avoid seeing her, or meeting her, or any talk or explanations—or ANY MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE.
He was suffering, ten years later, the same kind of frustrated passion that lies behind Calamus. Immediately below this entry we find an “outline sketch of a superb character”:
his emotions &c are complete in himself irrespective (indifferent) of whether his love, friendship, &c are returned, or not
He grows, blooms, like some perfect tree or flower, in Nature, whether viewed by admiring eyes, or in some wild or wood entirely unknown …
Depress the adhesive nature It is in excess—making life a torment All this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness.
Whitman could settle at neither pole. Years before this journal entry he had seen that indifferent, perfect tree “uttering joyous leaves,” and he knew it as an image of the being he longed for, “complete in himself.” But he also knew it was impossible, that he came best to song through contact. There is a spiritual path in which the soul ascends in isolation, abandoning all creatures. But this was not the path for Whitman, so hungry for affection and so present in his body. As he grew older Whitman did in fact find a form for his “adhesive nature”; he managed a series of long-lasting, basically paternal relationships with younger men, Doyle being one of them. But to judge from his letters, he wanted more. He wanted to “work and live together” with a man; he wanted to “get a good room or two in some quiet place … and … live together.” He never got it. When he presents himself to the world as “like some perfect tree,” we will be right, therefore, to feel a touch of perfection’s loneliness. All of this vegetable sex—these trees and leaves of grass—carries in it, sometimes, the disappointment of an animal desire. Even Osiris had Isis to warm his bones to life.
The picture I have drawn of the process of the gifted self began with its inhalation of objects; to turn now to the bestowing phase of this self, and in particular to the poetry as a gift, we must add a new and essential detail: the objects that inform the self are unable to speak. “You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers.” And not just objects—Whitman’s world is also filled with people who cannot speak. He offers them his tongue:
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, … Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
Dumb people, dumb objects. Not everything comes into the world with a tongue, it seems. The poet Miriam Levine, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, tells me that her family used to speak of articulate men and women as having been “born with a mouthpiece.” Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet or the reed of a wind instrument, through which experience is transmuted into sound. Whitman receives the mute into the self in order to articulate what he calls their “buried speech.” He becomes the mouthpiece of the dumb, and not, I suspect, of these objects and slaves alone but of his family and his lovers. This last in particular: in art as in life Whitman was always attracted to the figure of an inarticulate young man:
… I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,
He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate …,
O you shunn’d persons, I at least do not shun you,
I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet …
Peter Doyle was such an illiterate; Whitman taught him to read and write.
Knowing that Whitman’s art begins in speechlessness, we may find a new meaning in his invocation to the soul: “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.” It is the soul that has the mouthpiece, the mysterious ability to translate dumb hieroglyphs into speech.* The soul acknowledges and accepts what has entered the self by uttering its name. This responsive speech we call “celebration” or “thanksgiving.” In the fairy tales the spoken “thank you” or the act of gratitude accomplishes the transformation and frees the original gift; so in the poetry, for the soul to give speech to the stuff of experience is to accept it and to pass it along. Moreover, by Whitman’s model, the self does not come to life until the objects flow through it. (The increase does not appear until the gift moves to the third party.) Celebratory speech is the return gift by which what has been received by the self is freed and passed along. To open a poem saying “I celebrate myself” is therefore to announce the reciprocation-by-song which will simultaneously assure the life of the self and the liveliness of what has been bestowed upon it.* Or, to put it another way, by Whitman’s assumptions, we shall lose that life which remains unarticulated. This is why the family prizes the child with the mouthpiece (sometimes—not all families want to live!), or why a nation prizes its poets (sometimes)—and this also is the urgency behind Whitman’s attention to the mute: he would assure their lives by giving them speech. He would be the tongue for the “living and buried speech … always vibrating here, [the] howls restrain’d by decorum …”; he would allow his thoughts to be “the hymns of the praise of things,” so that the spirits which have been bestowed upon him—by the unlettered boy, the wood duck, the eddies of fog—will not perish.†
Before we describe Whitman’s work more fully in these terms, I should pause to clarify where, exactly, the gift lies in the creation of a work of art. In common usage the term covers three different things, unfortunately. And while I have tried to be more precise in my own usage, some confusion still creeps in. The initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self— by perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or by another work of art. Occasionally the unrefined materials of experience or imagination are finished works, in which case the artist is merely a transmitter or medium (the surrealist poets tried to work in this manner; the art of the religious society of Shakers also fits this model, their artists being known as “instruments” and their art as “gifts”). But it is rare for the initial material to be the finished work of art; we must usually labor with it.
The ability to do the labor is the second gift. The artist works, to echo Joseph Conrad once again, from that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition. To speak of our talents as gifts distinguishes them from those abilities that we acquire through the will. Two men may learn to speak a foreign language with equal accuracy, but the one who has a gift for languages does not have to struggle with his learning as does the man who has no gift. Men or women of talent must work to perfect their gifts, of course; no one is exempt from the long hours of practice. But to set out to acquire the gift itself through work is like trying to grow an extra hand, or wings. It can’t be done.
The artist’s gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon him; to put it another way, if the artist is gifted, the gift increases in its passage through the self. The artist makes something higher than what he has been given, and this, the finished work, is the third gift, the one offered to the world in general or directed back specifically to the “clan and homeland” of an earlier gift.
Whitman himself imagines the commerce of these gifts as both an inner and an outer activity. He has a strong sense of a reader to whom the poem is directed. That recipient is not always the conventional reader of the book, however; it is just as often an interior figure, Whitman’s own soul—or muse or genius or spirit—lover (the one he imagined would meet him in death, “the great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine”). In one of his prefaces Whitman sp
eaks of his poems as having been spoken to him by his soul—but he is dissembling if he would have us believe that these poems are the same as those we find printed on the page. The soul that translates dumb objects into speech does not speak the finished poem, as Whitman’s fat revision books attest. Out of what the soul has offered him, the poet makes the work. And in this interior commerce the finished work is a return gift, carried back into the soul. In a famous letter Keats wrote that the world is not so much a “vale of tears” as a “vale of soul-making.” The artist makes a soul, makes it real, in the commerce of gifts. As when the Roman sacrifices to his genius on his birthday so that it may grow and become free spirit, or as with any number of the exchanges we have described, the point of the commerce is a spiritual increase and the eventual actualization of the soul.
Every artist secretly hopes his art will make him attractive. Sometimes he or she imagines it is a lover, a child, a mentor, who will be drawn to the work. But alone in the workshop it is the soul itself the artist labors to delight. The labor of gratitude is the initial food we offer the soul in return for its gifts, and if it accepts our sacrifice we may be, as Whitman was, drawn into a gifted state—out of time, coherent, “in place.” And in those moments when we are gifted, the work falls together graciously. (Not always, of course. For some the work may fall into place regularly, but most of us cut out a thousand pairs of shoes before the elves begin to sew.)