V
1871 was the culminating year of Whitman's literary life. He was at the fullness of his powers. His final attack of paralysis was as yet a year away. For the exhibition of the American Institute he put the message of Democratic Vistas into poetic form—"After All, not to Create Only"—a glorious invitation to the muses to migrate to America:
Placard "Remov'd" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
a perfect hexameter line it will be noted, as also this:
Ended, deceas'd through time, her voice by Castaly's fountain.
And the same year he put forth an enlarged and enriched Leaves of Grass, including in it the splendid "Passage to India," celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal, a poem that is larger than the mere geographic bounds of its subject, world-wide as they were, for it is a poem universe-wide, celebrating the triumphs of the human soul.
We too take ship, O soul,
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul),
Caroling free, singing our song of God.
Passage to more than India!
Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?
Disportest thou on waters such as those?
Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?
Then have thy bent unleash'd.
The poems grouped around this splendid outburst, as indeed all the rest of his poems until illness and age began to dim his powers, are pitched in this major key. No poet in any time ever maintained himself longer at such high levels. His poems which he entitled "Whispers of Heavenly Death," are all of the upper air and the glory of the released soul of man. Not even Shelley has more of lyric abandon and pure joy than Whitman in such songs as "Darest Thou Now, O Soul":
Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space, O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O soul.
And what deeps and abysses in a lyric like this:
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul!
And then at last, paralyzed and helpless, his work done, the body he had gloried in slipping away from him, there came that magnificent outburst of faith and optimism that throws a glory over the whole of American poetry, the "Prayer of Columbus":
My terminus near,
The clouds already closing in upon me,
The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost,
I yield my ships to Thee.
My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
My brain feels rack'd, bewildered,
Let the old timbers part, I will not part,
I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,
Thee, Thee at least I know.
Sometime the poems of Whitman will be arranged in the order in which he wrote them, and then it will be seen that the poems by which he is chiefly judged—the chants of the body, the long catalogues of things (reduced greatly by the poet in his later editings), the barbaric yawp and the egotism—belong to only one brief period in his literary development; that in his later work he was the poet of the larger life of man, the most positive singer of the human soul in the whole range of English literature. If the earlier Whitman is the singer of a type of democracy that does not exist in America except as an abstract theory, the later Whitman is the singer of the universal heart of man. The Whitman that will endure emerged from the furnace of the Civil War. In his own words:
Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.[89]
And again,
I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged or been fashion'd or completed, from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than democratic America, and from the absolute triumph of the national Union arms.[90]
He is not always easy reading; he is not always consecutive and logical. He said himself that the key to his style was suggestiveness.
I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.
He is oracular; he talks darkly, like the priestess in the temple, in snatches and Orphic ejaculations, and we listen with eagerness. Had he been as clear and as consecutive as Longfellow he would not have had at all the vogue that has been his. Somehow he gives the impression constantly to his reader, as he gave it in earlier years to Thoreau, that there is something superhuman about him. He is a misty landscape illuminated by lightning flashes. We feel that we are near lofty mountains; now and then we catch glimpses of a snowy peak, but only for a moment. The fitful roll of the thunder excites us and the flashes sometimes terrify, and the whole effect of the experience is on the side of the feelings. There is little clear vision. Or, perhaps, a better figure: taking his entire work we have the great refuse heap of the universe. He shows it to us with eagerness; nothing disgusts him, nothing disconcerts him. Now he pulls forth a diamond, now a potsherd, and he insists that both are equally valuable. He is joyous at every return of the grappling hook. Are not all together in the heap; shall the diamond say to the potsherd, I am better than thou?
He was early touched by the nature movement of the mid century. With half a dozen poems he has made himself the leading American poet of the sea. In all of his earlier work there breathes the spirit of the living out-of-doors until he may be ranked with Thoreau and Muir and Burroughs. It was the opinion of Burroughs that "No American poet has studied American nature more closely than Whitman, or is more cautious in his uses of it." He is not the poet of the drawing-room—he is the poet of the vast sweep of the square miles, of the open sky, of the cosmos. "Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air," he contended; "is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as art is." And it was his mission, as he conceived it, "to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete."
He is not a scientist with Nature; he does not know enough to be a scientist, and his methods and cast of mind are hopelessly unscientific. He is simply a man who feels.
You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river, or marine nature generally. I repeat it—don't want to know too exactly, or the reasons why.
Such a paragraph is worth a chapter of analysis, and so also is a poem like this:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
His intellect is not so developed as his emotions. He cannot think; he can feel. And after all is not the essence of all poetry, of all the meanings of life, of the soul, of Nature in its message to man, a thing not of the intellect but of the sensitive spirit of man?