"Who touches this book touches a man."
There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the tricks of literary sophistication. He wanted his poetry to sound with nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more large with candor and directness. But here again a cool and clear science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in its complexity, its subtle and refined dissimulation of the fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied, in the heart of all rhythmical experience. Persons who can read the rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its undulations are akin to the intrinsic character of neural motion, and that is why, almost as though it were a chemical thing—a stimulant and narcotic—it takes possession of our state-of-being and controls it.
Poetry only naïvely acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not "ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called "rhythmical speech." They are the heart of rhythmical speech expressed and exposed with a perfectly childlike and candid grandeur. Prose is the refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment—a thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.
Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman and sublime. His emotions were as though they came to him through a celestial telescope. There is something more properly savage—something at least truly barbarous—in a poem like Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's insistence upon "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the poem—beauty, which he defines as a special and dispassionate "excitement of the soul"—he is nearer to the mood of the snake dance. Poetry was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. And one can see in reading his verses how he was attuned to sway and quiver to the mere syllabic singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions grew more intense and lovely than the passions and real meanings of his life. It is actually primitive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in this intense and yet unsanctimonious way that Poe did, and Baudelaire too, and Swinburne. Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspiration. It is healthier perhaps too, and more to the taste of the future, than priesthood. I think the essence of what we call classical in an artist's attitude is his quite frank acknowledgment that—whatever great things may come of it—he is at play. The art of the Athenians was objective and overt about being what it is, because the Athenians were educated, as all free men should be, for play. They were making things, and the eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a child's through their eyes upon the things that they made. That pearl of adult degeneration, the self, was very little cultivated in Athens; the "artistic temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the perpetual yearning beyond of Christians, had not been thought of. A little group of isolated and exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain in itself intimations of otherness. The Athenians were radiantly willing, without any cosmical preparation or blare of moral resolve, to let the constellations stay where they are. It was their custom to "loaf and invite their souls," to be "satisfied—see, dance, laugh, sing." They were so maturely naïve that they would hardly understand what Walt Whitman, with his declarations of animal independence, was trying to recover from. And so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city that we can most surely go back to nature.
And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural—a mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time, then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that belongs to the people. For people are, in the depths of them and on the average as they are born, still natural, still savage. And there is no doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of their interest. And it will seem rather a fever in the light of universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an immortal reverence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with nature, were at play. And in Japan even today—surviving from that time—there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation.
If with this pagan and oriental love for the created thing—the same love that kept a light in Poe's sombre heart—we enter somewhat irreverently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our own treasure and not hesitating to remove it from its bed of immortal slag, we do find poems in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. Sometimes for the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza, and once for the whole poem—"When I heard at the close of the day"—Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to all minds that are in tune. He seems, without losing that large grace of freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple people—the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect existence of a thing.
HUSH'D BE THE CAMPS
| Hush'd be the camps today; And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons; And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate, Our dear commander's death. No more for him life's stormy conflicts; Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time's dark events, Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky. |
| Word over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world.... |