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My words itch at yours ears till you understand them.
It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.
What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 which makes him a part of the first generation of children who were born Americans. He was not of the generation fighting the physical battle of the Revolution but rather a part of the group that got to be idealists and dream up what this country could become.
Here he was, at the birth of a nation, encapsulating in poetic voice the possibilities in the air. To find the spirit of a land that truly wishes to be free, to be equal, to be perfect, Walt had to let go of the traditions of the past (let go, but not destroy). The old heroes and legends were tied to a different society and culture. They told a different story. We needed our own Epic.
To do this, he went inward. He decided we didn't need external heroes to look up to, to compare ourselves to, to be a guiding light. We have nature and ourselves. That is enough. That gives us everything we need. The subject of his story, and the story of America, was—and in many ways still is—the Self. It is you, me, him, everyone that inhabited this land and the earth. America is the story of the individual and likewise, Walt's poems are celebrating the individual, celebrating himself and yourself, as the true possessor of knowledge if we only stop and let the wisdom reveal itself.
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
The 1855 version of Leaves of Grass opens with a collection titled Song of Myself. At around 1,300 lines long, Walt sings out a song that celebrates and explores himself, along with who you are, who I am, and, taken together, a vision of who we are.
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
The most common of objects is worthy of elevation within Walt's epic. Again, the heroes and stories are not those of the gods but rather the individuals. The boatmen, the seamstress, the blacksmith, the child, the grandmother, the beggar, the rich man, the farmer, the scholar, the drunkard, the clergymen all the way down to the trees, rocks, grass, ants, worms, and moss.
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth
[. . .]
A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.
I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)
Song of Myself, 1—in its final version—opens:
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Walt opens Song of Myself with a celebration. Epics are full of celebrations for their subjects, their heroes, but what is so unusual is that Whitman uses "myself" as the focus of his celebration: "I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." These three lines burst forth with an "original energy"—Walt's new vision.
Walt is celebrating and singing himself. He is putting himself as worthy to be celebrated. It is not one of dominance or of ego. It is out of acceptance that all are equal, everyone is the same, "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
What Walt is recognizing is that we should celebrate ourselves for who we are. Traditions and rites of passage often make us prove our worth or hold us up against an ideal that needs to be cultivated. Walt is asking us to stop our compulsion to prove ourselves and simply just be ourselves.
I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.
He recognizes the foolishness of defining ourselves by our external identities (race, gender, class, education, beliefs, etc) for internally we are all made up of the same atoms. Every atom within me belongs to me just as much as it does to you because I am simply a passer-by. My collection of atoms makeup me today but eventually will return to the earth, maybe to be formed with a rock or a tree, or to come up, continued on, as the grass!
There is a beautiful passage in section 6 of Song of Myself where Whitman is asked by a child "What is the grass?" and, at first, he thinks to himself that he has no more an answer than the child. He begins to ponder and comes up with a few options. Perhaps it is "the flag of my disposition" or the "handkerchief of the Lord. . . designedly dropt." He goes further and proposes that maybe it "is itself a child, the produced babe of vegetation" or perhaps it is a symbol of equality and freedom since it grows in all lands no matter the culture, race, beliefs, etc.
But then he happens upon the most beautiful of sentiments:
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
This beautiful passage reminds me of a Native American quote [1]:
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair?
Wovoka, Paiute
I cannot resist adding Gregory Orr's poem that feels like a perfect complement to Walt's [2]:
Humble dazzle
Of autumn:
These leaves
On the ground —
Each one a page
In the Book,
A poem that says:
I lived.
I was
A small part
Of the whole
Story — this
Is my song,
This is my glory.
The leaves that fall, themselves a song of their former glory, will continue on to life through their returning to the earth and forming again into new life. Thus the cycle ever repeats itself.
Walt sees every blade of grass as the life that sprung out of the death of past generations. Walt is freeing death from the feeling of it being the end. He simply releases the ego—the feeling that I die therefore life must not go on—and opens us up to the realization that death only brings forward more life.
Towards the end of Song of Myself Walt returns to the concept of mortality with the following words that show Walt having now risen above the shackles of death into a realm of embodied life:
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.
To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.
And as to you Corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons.
And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.
But I digress and could continue on mercilessly. I simply wanted to make the point that Whitman, in that opening stanza of Song of Myself, sets out a vision of the world where everyone sees each other not for their external achievements or identities but rather for the fact that we all are of the same stuff woven. The atoms in me do not belong only to me because when I depart this earth, they will pass on and move forward to new life. They will continue on their journey as they have thousands of times.
This is the sentiment Walt returns to at the end of Song of Myself when he proclaims:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
After Walt announces the celebration of himself, he moves to the second stanza where the metaphor of the grass is first given voice:
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Another shock to the system. Walt is here not only admitting but proclaiming, singing out, that he "loafes" and sits at ease with nothing else than "a spear summer grass" to occupy his time. He allows himself to be fully within the present moment, something our culture seems to value little as it did in Whitman's time.
Walt is showing us that we can be satisfied and complete by just simply stopping and observing the world around us.
He writes:
I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
And the incredible passage from Song of Myself, 20:
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barely corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
[. . .]
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
Not only is Walt "satisfied," singing "I exist as I am, that is enough," but the mere fact of sitting, reflecting, gazing, and loafing about—the act of sitting and observing yourself and contemplating nature—is an experience that brings into knowledge all that is around us and within us everyday if we only choose to stop and translate it (or open ourselves up to Walt's translation).
This knowledge we translate by turning into a song—by singing it awake as Gregory Orr points out in his incredible poem "This is what was bequeathed us" [3]:
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.
We find meaning here and we make our own purpose. We have been bequeathed the earth that was left to us, left by our beloved, left by Walt as he accepts a fate of living under our "boot-soles," left to us by every past generation. Whether it be Orr or Whitman or you or me or anyone else, we can translate the world around us, we can translate ourselves, into songs that allow us to make our journey.
The bequeathing of the earth that Orr so beautifully expresses no doubt springs out of Walt's third stanza of Song of Myself, 1:
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
And then Walt, after taking away our sense of possession, takes away our over-reliance on beliefs and credos by proclaiming that we put our "creeds and schools in abeyance" as we burst forth with the "original energy" of Nature [4]:
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Walt is not giving us a new creed or dogma. He is asking us to leave our pre-formed opinions, our beliefs or biases, asking us to put what we think we know at the door. He's inviting us to drop these blinders so that we can see the world afresh, to observe the grass as if it's the first time we ever have observed the grass. He's asking us for once to put down our guard and to look at the world with curiosity. His Epic is not to find something new but to return back to the earth. What he's really doing is asking us to go back to the "original energy," the original source, return to the world that has always been there but often overlooked. He's asking us to observe the present moment as it truly is and not through anybody else's eyes, not through any second or third person. Instead, looking at it through the eyes of ourselves.
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
His songs do not tell but rather invite us into observation. The poems are meant to be a gateway and entry point, what I have called 'exploration fueled by curiosity.' At the front of the poem—the opening of those 52 sections contained in Song of Myself—he simply asks us to put down what we thought we knew and for once see everything as it is. It's not about who I am but asking who am I? what am I? and what is this world?
In only four stanzas, Walt not only announces the new voice of America but sings out the opposite of what we hold on to so fiercely: possessions and beliefs. We work to build and collect possessions. We feel this earth as if it is our own, as if land somehow we own and only we.
This rings out in another text originating from 1855. It is the famous response of Native American Chief Seattle to President Franklin Pierce:
The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky, the land? The idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, all are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We’re part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father; the rivers are our brothers. They carry our canoes and feed our children.
If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. This we know: the earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. All things are connected, like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? The end of living and the beginning of survival. When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any spirit of my people left? We love this earth as the newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it; care for it as we’ve cared for it, hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all. One thing we know, there is only one God; no man be he red man or white man can be apart. We are brothers, after all. [5]
We also hold on to our beliefs and let them divide us. We are unable to move in the world without fear of our beliefs being contradicted. We put up barriers instead of building bridges. We don't move with curiosity and openness but rather with suspicion and closed-mindedness.
Remember that Walt first penned these words about six years before the start of the American Civil War. America was dividing itself. It clung to possessions (both material and of other persons) and was relentless in holding on to its one-sided or ill-informed beliefs. It tore itself apart and perhaps there is a danger of that happening again.
Now, just as in 1855, we need Walt and others to translate into words the eternal mysteries and knowledge to be had around us. But we can't just take Walt's words. We need to use them simply as a gateway to ourselves, as a path to self-awakening.
Song of Myself is both an exultation of the individual as well as a collecting of all people, no matter who you are, where you came from, what you believe, or anything else. We are of one identity. We are one people. We are each unique yet also the same. Like leaves of grass, each one is different yet create a unified whole. This was Walt's song, a vision that may not yet have been fulfilled but certainly is not forgotten.
Song of Myself, 1
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing 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.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
1 From The Wisdom of the Native Americans edited by Kent Nerburn, p. 6.
2 Taken from How Beautiful the Beloved, a wonderful collection of poems by Gregory Orr.
3 Ibid.
4 See Ed Folsom's and Christopher Merrill's commentary on the wonderful Whitman Archive site.
5 There is a lot of controversy around whether the above was actually what Chief Seattle wrote or an adaptation by a Hollywood screen writer for a movie in the 1970s. See footnote here: http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/seattle.htm
Many people spend a great deal of time trying to find the "true" letter but, alas, does it really matter? It is no doubt conveying the sentiments felt by those tribes that were forcibly removed from their lands, slaughtered by the hand of the government, and watching their sacred land be defiled and destroyed for the sake of industrialization.
To debate its authenticity is to miss the point. What the writing expresses is what matters, not whether or not every single word is literally how it was dictated. To over-analyze is to fall into the trap of letting our search for truth override our ability to find meaning.
This reminds me of several passages of Song of Myself but specifically the following from section 4:
Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
[. . .]
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait."
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