Walt Whitman-A Study

BY P. SAMA RAO, B.A., B.L., Bellary

"Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power,-
Cheerful, for freest action, form’d under the Laws divine,
Of modern Man I sing."

–The Song of Life.

I

In estimating the poet’s art one must take into consideration the substance of his message as well as the craft with which he dresses it. The beauty of the sirish flower is heightened by its bed of luxurious tender foliage. "How much the poetry spends upon the nice inflections of rhythm alone may be proved," as Montogomery says. The rhythm of substance decked in the rhythmic garb is the charming Angel of divinity who ministers joy for ever.

The poetic being of an artist has two sides; the intellectual and the emotional. They are closely allied and are interdependent for his art. One without the other cannot endure and is not productive of the right appeal. The vigorous intellectual logic that connects cause and effect in the world of physical nature marks out the scientist; but something more than that is required of a poet. In our daily experience with the world our chief interest is not in things as they are but with their emotive value. In the words of Hudson,

"Though the mystery and beauty of the world, are habitually recognised by us, they are recognised for the most part only in a vague and sluggish way. There are, however, moods of heightened feeling in which they come to us with special vividness and power. It is then that we are deeply stirred-to delight or wonder, to gratitude or reverent awe. Out of such moods poetry springs; to such moods it addresses itself. It reports to us of things from their emotional and spiritual sides. It expresses and interprets their appeal to us, and our response to them. It is thus at once the antithesis and the compliment of science."

Thus poetry begins where matter of fact or science ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further truth, the connection it has with the world of emotion and its power to produce imaginative pleasure. Hence the interpretations of the physical universe by a scientist do not give us that intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give; the former appeal only to the limited faculty of man and not to the whole man. It is not Cavendish or Thompson who can hit off the true sense of animals, or water or plants, and make us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare with his

"…………………………daffodils
That come before the swallow dares and take
The winds of March with beauty;"

and Keats with his

"Moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores ;"

that ennoble life end it with lasting fragrance

II

The first thought that crosses one’s mind after a dip into the slender Leaves of Grass is that the poet is concerned not so much with a description nature for its own sake as he is with the emotions that are kindled, by it in his breast. Nature is but a -ground for the interpretation of Man. His definition of Nature does not stop with the vegetable and animal kingdoms but extends to that of the human. It is to the latter that he always addresses himself, not because the human world is in any way superior to the other worlds, but only with that usual child’s curiosity which gapes with wonder at every face he passes by. His primary emotions centre round human beings and attune themselves to their joys and sorrows. This identity reaches such a climax that one is confronted with a doubt whether there existed a similar being ever before. But his partiality and love for the human world is not an exclusive passion with him. A glorious sunrise or sundown, the smiling gaiety of spring flowers and the half-mystic, half-coquettish tripping of a village girl, move him to the same extent as a vociferous congregation of mortals crying for liberty or redemption. His love for all kinds of life flows out with the same ease and spontaneity as the mountain breeze. The vehemence in his poems is the outcome not of his passions but of his soul-force. "There was always something about him of the imperturbable confidence, the unsoiled freshness of nature; his face had caught the good gigantic smile of the brown old earth." He had that sturdy independence which always characterised deeply religious soul. He looked on none as Superior to himself except One to whom he owed the very breath of existence. So he drew his inspiration–as Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth did–not from his predecessor poets but from Nature herself in her rebellious form of the sea;

"Sea!…...All these I would gladly barter
Would you the audulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer
Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse
And leave its odour there."

This spirit of his can be justified when we ponder over the fact that he always approached the primitive sources of inspiration as no other poet has so devotedly done, Though he recognises poetry and romance as treasure houses of beauty and the wisdom of the past, yet he finally trusts in what he declares,

"A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books," -Song of Myself.

He mystifies himself occasionally. He has subscribed himself often to the faith that he like all creatures is fast and intimately connected with one another in the divine mosaic of creation, He lays down the samatva of God’s religion preached in the Gita. He thinks himself the mightiest of the mightiest and would touch his hat to no one, although his heart over flowed with the zest of camaraderie. For he sings in his Song of Joys:

"O the joy of a manly selfhood!
To be servile to none, to defer to any tyrant known or unknown,
To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic
To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye,
To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest.
To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth"

–Song of Joys

That is why he is often struck with remorse when he sees servility in the human kingdom. He ardently practises what he heroically expresses. This is the secret of his appreciation of animals:

"I think I can turn and live with animals, they are
so placid and self-contained:
I stand and look at them long end long.
They do not sweat or whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and sweep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."

–Song of Myself

Therefore the very first lesson he would teach mankind is to convince them of their potential greatness:

"They must learn to put from them all cringing to what is outside them and stand erect, self-possessed, reverencing, even glorying in the divine in their own natures."

Thus we see he has nothing to do with the religion that advocates self-abasement. He is deeply religious with all that. He dreams of the God-head:

"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
"In the faces of men and women I see God and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters of God dropt in the street and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that
Wheresoever I go
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."

–Song of Myself.

This is his theory of evolution, not quite foreign to the Hindu. Having thus prescribed a course of conduct best suited for man, Whitman goes on to describe the form of worship that is to be laid at the feet of the Almighty. He agrees with Tagore and declares that the body is often the expression of the soul. Worship of God according to him must begin by reverencing the divine in one’s self, and recognising that nothing is essentially common or unclean. He interrogates to himself:

"Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See your own shape and countenance, persons,
substances, beasts, the trees, the running brooks, the rocks, and sands,
All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
How can the real body die and be buried?
Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main
concern, and includes and is the soul;"

–Starting from Paumanok.

and answers himself:

"Clear and sweet is my soul and clear and sweet is all
that is not my soul.
Lack one lack both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receive a proof in its turn."

–Song of Myself.

 Whitman’s view of the sanctity of the human body drove him to a logical extreme. He demurred and even openly hated any veiled reference to the physical relation of the sexes. Grecian in temperament, like Anatole France, he loathed to see a well-built frame disguised in the frills of the modern-day attire.

III

Whitman was a great socialist. His glowing love for humanity was his sole emotion throughout his life. It was the finest essence of his being. Happiness is no chimera, for he unhesitatingly believed that it lay not so much in some distant El’Dorado, as in ones own daily path;

"We consider bibles and religions divine–I do not say
they are not divine,
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow
out of you still,
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from
the earth, than they are shed out of you."

–Song of Occupation

and further on,

"Will you seek afar off? You surely come at last,
in things best known to you finding the best, or as
good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest,
strongest, lovingest,
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this
place, not for another hour, but this hour,
Man is the first you see or touch, always in friend,
brother, nighest neighbour–woman in mother,
sister, wife,
The popular tastes and employments taking precedence
in poems or anywhere,
You work-women and workmen of these states having your
own divine and strong life,
And all else giving place to men and women like you."

–Song of Occupation

His belief in the efficacy of social service for salvation was put to an acid test in the year 1861, when on account of the war between the Northern and the Southern States a huge crop of wounded heroes awaited his healing touch. To them his heart went out freely, although he condemned war on the basis that there was no right provided by God for killing one another. He watched over their beds all day and night as no beloved would. This was his Galahad’s vigil. He nursed them and implanted fresh hopes into their hope-rid breasts. Though he hated the war he was not averse to mend its necessary evils. There is a typical passage in His Specimen Days illustrative of his attention:

"This afternoon I spent a long time with Oscar Wilber, low with the chronic diarrhea and a bad wound also. He asked me to read to him a chapter of the New Testament....The poor wasted young man asked me to read how Christ rose again. I read slowly, for Oscar was very weak. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes….He behaved very manly and affectionately. The kiss I gave him as I was leaving he returned fourfold."

The spirit which breathes through these simple jottings breaks out into a perfect lyric in "A sight in camp in the daybreak grey and dim,"–

"Then to the second step–And who are you my child
and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
Then to the third–a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of
beautiful yellow old ivory;
"Young man, I think I know you–I think this face is the
face of Christ Himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all and here again He lies."

So goes on Whitman, the divine friend to all. The secret of his service was sacrifice. When he gave he gave himself thoroughly.

This continuous strain got the better of even his steel frame finally. He gifted himself to the service of all humanity with a love which was the greatest of all gifts. He was soon struck with paralysis, and he laid down his life like a soldier on the battle-field. He had realised that joy had significance only to those that had passed through sorrow; and that it was one of the chiefest duties of mankind to alleviate suffering and secure Joy to those who lacked it. As a boy when he romped over the seashore he witnessed one of nature’s remorseless tragedies. Day after day he had seen complacently "two feathered guests from Alabama" together and one day the grievous screaming of the he-bird for the loss of his mate cut to the quick. This painful experience the poet applied to his own and whenever his eyes afterwards fell on sorrow he identified himself so much with the aggrieved that his own soul twinged and wept;

"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 hurts turn livid upon me, as I lean on a
cane and observe."

He is an optimist withal. His own sorrows and those of others left no disruptive stain on his cheerfulness. They did not sour his temperament. His permenent buoyancy, however, did not make him blind or callous to the sin and sorrow of the world. He looks upon them all with the perfect detachment of a ripened yogin. He accepted them with out flinching, as he believed them to be but transitory. What he believed to be immortal and everlasting was only the spirit of man. Besides, he believed in the ultimate destiny of human beings as a karma-yogin. In his poem "Faces", he refuses to be deluded by "the mean and haggard disguises under which men conceal their infinite possibilities–the cheat, the murderer, the idiot", in the faith that sooner or later the true man would emerge. His words to the Common Prostitute attain the sublimity of Christ’s address to Mary Magdalene:

"Be composed–be at ease with me–I am Walt Whitman,
liberal and lusty as nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and
the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse
to glisten and rustle for you,
My girl, I appoint with you an appointment and I charge
you that you make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come;
Till then, I salute you with a significant look
that you do not forget me."

To him, as to every genuine yogin, there was nothing despicable except one’s own despicable self steeped in sin. A veritable Christ of the New World!

IV

Whitman’s religion is not divorced from politics. He is generally acclaimed as the foremost among the poets of democracy. He is so not in the sense he believed in the rule of the majority elected by the majority of votes, but in the sense that individuals should be bound to one another by the faster ties of true camaraderie. The spirit of equality and affection should inform the Political Government of a nation. That way Nations became brothers to one another, and there was no need for the narrow activity of Nationalism except for the purpose of group improvement in the attainment of wealth and welfare among its units. It is this principle that inspired him into exclaiming,

"Whoever degrades another degrades me,
and what-so-ever is said or done returns at last to me.
I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have
on the same terms.

–Song of Myself

He claims equal rights for man and woman and his ideal city is one where "the women walk in public processions in the streets the same as men, they enter the public assembly and take their places the same as the men."

To him, "it is great to be woman as to be a man, and nothing is greater than to be the mother of men." In this he is voicing out indirectly our own sentiment about Kali, the World-Mother. So he inculcated that mankind should be fearless and assert their own potential greatness by giving up all slavish mentality. He asks them to "stand erect, self-possessed, reverencing, even glorying in the divine in their own natures." He regards himself divine, not in the egoistic mood, but only in the moment of ecstasy when he felt himself one with God:

"Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever
I touch or am touched from,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds."

There is no parallel in any English poet past or living so expressive of the Advaitic Doctrine, "I am He." It is this equality which he claims with God that made him proudly utter,

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey
work of stars,
And the Pismire is equally perfect and a grain of sand
and the egg of the wren,
And the tree toad, is a chef d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours
of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all
machinery,
And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses
any statue,
And a mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillions
of infidels."

–Song of Myself.

Whitman is an embodiment of love. It bases his doctrine of equality. As selincourt observes,

"There is no patronage in love, nothing of that condescension
which is often misnamed sympathy. Love has
this divine power that he raises to his own level
all that he gathers in his arms."

This central emotion of the poet permeates everything he wrote or thought.

Great names have no charm or attraction for him except when their spiritual existences are guided by godly principles. It is not the names but the principles underlying them that make him sing,–

"Underneath Socrates I see, and underneath Christ the
divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction
of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children
and parents, of city for city, and land for land,"

–The Base of all Metaphysics.

He is no revolutionary withal; for his creed is only to establish a righteous kingdom for humanity and plant therein "the dear love of comrades."

The supernatural element in nature does not deter him nor extort any homage; because he is as free as the mountain air and claims kinship with God even:

"The supernatural is of no account, myself waiting my
time to be one of the supreme,
The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much
good as the best, and be as prodigious,
By my lifelumps! becoming already a creator,
Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb
of the shadows."

–Song of Myself

So it is no surprise to note that he is one with Carlyle in regarding history as a string of eminent biographies, and that city as truly great which "has the greatest men and women."

In short, Whitman’s politics is a bunch of the principles of liberty, equality, and democracy, which are inspirited with divine comradeship,

"Over the carnage rose the prophetic voice,
Be not disheartened, affection shall solve the problems
of freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible."

If religion could be defined as a glorious march of love of the created to the Creator, Whitman has this religion. Politics is only one of its many aspects, It is related to it as species to genus. In fine, this poet, this sturdy yokel, is a prophet of democracy in all and every ideal significance of the term.