Category: Whitman’s poems

In Redburn, I have just discovered that Herman Melville explicitly lays out my thesis that the entire American economy during the Age of Sail depended upon the exploitation of sailor personalities, which were innately reckless, impulsive, addictive, and thrill-seeking:

…with the majority of them, the very fact of their being sailors, argues a certain recklessness and sensualism of character, ignorance, and depravity; consider that they are generally friendless and alone in the world; or if they have friends and relatives, they are almost constantly beyond the reach of their good influences… consider that by their very vocation they are shunned by the better classes of people, and cut off from all access to respectable and improving society…

There are classes of men in the world, who bear the same relation to society at large, that the wheels do to a coach: and are just as indispensable. But however easy and delectable the springs upon which the insiders pleasantly vibrate: however sumptuous the hammer-cloth, and glossy the door-panels; yet, for all this, the wheels must still revolve in dusty, or muddy revolutions. No contrivance, no sagacity can lift them out of the mire; for upon something the coach must be bottomed; on something the insiders must roll.

Now, sailors form one of these wheels: they go and come round the globe; they are the true importers, and exporters of spices and silks; of fruits and wines and marbles; they carry missionaries, embassadors, opera-singers, armies, merchants, tourists, and scholars to their destination: they are a bridge of boats across the Atlantic; they are the primum mobile of all commerce; and, in short, were they to emigrate in a body to man the navies of the moon, almost every thing would stop here on earth except its revolution on its axis, and the orators in the American Congress.

And yet, what are sailors? What in your heart do you think of that fellow staggering along the dock? Do you not give him a wide berth, shun him, and account him but little above the brutes that perish? Will you throw open your parlors to him; invite him to dinner? or give him a season ticket to your pew in church?–No. You will do no such thing; but at a distance, you will perhaps subscribe a dollar or two for the building of a hospital, to accommodate sailors already broken down; or for the distribution of excellent books among tars who can not read. And the very mode and manner in which such charities are made, bespeak, more than words, the low estimation in which sailors are held. It is useless to gainsay it; they are deemed almost the refuse and offscourings of the earth; and the romantic view of them is principally had through romances.

But can sailors, one of the wheels of this world, be wholly lifted up from the mire? There seems not much chance for it, in the old systems and programmes of the future, however well-intentioned and sincere; for with such systems, the thought of lifting them up seems almost as hopeless as that of growing the grape in Nova Zembla…

To which Walt Whitman effectively answered:

I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share
the midnight orgies of young men,
I dance with the dancers, and drink with the drink-
ers,
The echoes ring with our indecent calls,
I take for my love some prostitute—I pick out some
low person for my dearest friend,
He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate—he shall be one
condemned by others for deeds done;
I will play a part no longer—Why should I exile
myself from my companions?
O you shunned persons! I at least do not shun you,
I come forthwith in your midst—I will be your poet,
I will be more to you than to any of the rest.

And:

Then falter not, O book! fulfil your destiny!
You, not a reminiscence of the land alone,
You too, as a lone bark, cleaving the ether—purpos’d I
know not whither—yet ever full of faith,
Consort to every ship that sails—sail you!
Bear forth to them, folded, my love —(Dear mariners!
for you I fold it here, in every leaf;)
Speed on, my Book! spread your white sails, my little
bark, athwart the imperious waves!
Chant on—sail on—bear o’er the boundless blue, from
me, to every shore,
This song for mariners and all their ships.

In spring 2010 the National Humanities Center will host two interactive, online seminars featuring American Experience episodes, Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry and Hamilton’s America – Jefferson’s America. In Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry, Franny Nudleman, an English professor at Carleton University, will lead an exploration of how Whitman, an antislavery Democrat, incorporated incorporated “the real war” in his poems. Hamilton’s America – Jefferson’s America, led by Peter Onuf, a history professor at the University of Virginia, will examine the distinct visions Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had for the new nation they were founding.

Frederick Church, The Meteor (1860)

Kevin Sharp’s “Bold, Cautious, and True” exhibition in Memphis includes pieces by Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Frederic Church and John Frederick Kensett. Church’s contribution is “The Meteors of 1860,” and Sharp describes its significance:

Meteor showers were incredibly common in 1859 and especially in the summer of 1860 and everyone read it in the newspapers as a harbinger of things to come. It’s not hard to imagine that people would see those comet sprays across the sky as cannonballs.

Jonathan Devin. “Dixon’s Civil War Exhibit Punctuated by Whitman’s Poetry.” Memphis Daily News. Vol. 124, Monday, August 24, 2009, no. 165.

Whitman’s iconic poem acts as a caption for this iconic painting:

YEAR OF METEORS.
(1859-60.)
YEAR of meteors! brooding year!
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds
and signs;
I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,
mounted the scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I
watch’d;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indiffer-
ent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d
wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)
I would sing in my copious song your census returns of
The States,
The tables of population and products—I would sing of
your ships and their cargoes,
The proud black ships of Manhattan, arriving, some
fill’d with immigrants, some from the isthmus
with cargoes of gold;
Songs thereof would I sing—to all that hitherward
comes would I welcome give;
And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you
from me, sweet boy of England!
Remember you surging Manhattan’s crowds, as you
passed with your cortege of nobles?
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with
attachment;
I know not why, but I loved you…(and so go forth
little song,
Far over sea speed like an arrow, carrying my love all
folded,
And find in his palace the youth I love, and drop these
lines at his feet;)
—Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she
swam up my bay,
Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my
bay, she was 600 feet long,
Her moving swiftly, surrounded by myriads of small
craft, I forget not to sing;
Nor the comet that came unannounced, out of the north,
flaring in heaven,
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and
clear, shooting over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearth-
ly light over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
—Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from
them would I gleam and patch these chants;
Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good!
year of forebodings! year of the youth I love!
Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo!
even here, one equally transient and strange!
As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone,
what is this book,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?

In the 1842 additions to Proverbial Philosophy, says Brian Thompson, “the author really does jump out of the shadows and buttonhole the reader like some whiskery Mad Man of the Woods.” Thompson then cites:

Come again, and greet me as a friend, fellow-pilgrim upon life’s highway,
Leave awhile the hot and dusty road, to loiter in the greenwood of Reflection,
Come unto my cool dim grotto, that is watered by the Rivulet of truth,
And over whose time-stained rock climb the fairy flowers of content :
Here, upon this mossy bank of leisure fling thy load of cares,
Taste my simple store, and rest one cooling hour.

Note the words I’ve bolded. Given that readers of “Song of Myself” are always arrested by the “loafe with me on the grass” introduction to “Song of Myself,” this adds to the amazing list of thematic sources in Tupper I’ve discovered for Whitman’s poetry.

Brian Thompson. The Nightmare of the Victorian Bookseller: Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy. (London: Short Books, 2002), 43-44.