His lines are not prose, even the worst of them. There is a roll about them, a falling of the voice at stressed intervals, an alternate time-beat, crude at times, violated often, yet nevertheless an obedience to law.
It is impossible for any poet, however lawless and apathetic to rules, to compose year after year without at last falling into a stereotyped habit of manner, and evolving a metric roll that is second nature. That Whitman was not conscious of any metric law within himself goes without saying. He believed that he was as free as the tides of the ocean and the waves that rolled among the rocks—lawless, unconfined.
I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but I confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages—that they should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.[91]
But a study of Whitman reveals the fact that certain laws did more and more assume mastery over him. With every year the time-beat of his poems grew increasingly hexametric. One may go through his later poems and find on the average a full hexameter line on every page. I quote at random:
To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me.
How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother?
Behold thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains.
His ear unconsciously seemed to demand the roll of the dactyl, then a cesura after from five to seven beats, then a closing roll longer or shorter as his mood struck him. The greater number of his later lines open as if the line was to be a hexameter: "Over the breast of the spring," "Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat," "Passing the apple tree blows," "Coffin that passes through lakes," and so on and on.
But one can make a broader statement. The total effect of the poems after 1870, like the "Song of the Redwood," for instance, is hexametric, though few of the lines may be hexameters as they stand. One might arrange this song like this:
A California song, | a prophecy and indirection,
A thought impalpable | to breathe as air, a chorus
Of dryads, fading departing, | or hamadryads departing,
A murmuring, fateful giant | voice out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying | tree in the redwood forest
Dense. Farewell my brethren, | Farewell O earth and sky,
Farewell ye neighboring waters, | my time has ended, my term
Has come along the northern coast | just back from the rockbound shore,
And the caves in the saline air | from the sea in the Mendocino
Country with the surge for base | and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes | sounding musically driven
By strong arms driven deep | by the sharp tongues of the axes,
There in the redwood forest | dense I heard the mighty
Tree in its death chant chanting.