Birds and Poets : with Other Papers

by John Burroughs

But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:—

"I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
And call anything close again when I desire it.
"In vain the speeding and shyness;
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;
In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
lying low."

In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and man is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:—

"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things
to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
steps;
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing—I know I was even there;
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.
"Long I was hugg'd close—long and long,
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
"Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it,
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long low strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
it with care;
All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight
me:
Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."

I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my imagination like that beginning the second stanza:—

"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."

One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses onward on his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is another quality in my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a mere hint of it now and then in Lucretius,—a quality easier felt than described. It is a tidal wave of emotion running all through the poems, which is now and then crested with such passages as this:—

"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.
"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
"Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with
blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my
sake!
Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!"

Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"—a poetic thrill and rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,—its chemistry and vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products. It affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems are projected, and accounts for what several critics call their sense of magnitude,—"something of the vastness of the succession of objects in Nature."

"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
of the earth!
I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate
the theory of the earth!
No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth."