"Self-love and Reason to one end aspire,
Pain their aversion, Pleasure their desire."
Here the scansion is regular, the verse polished, the thought undemocratic. The world had long been used to such regular poetry. The form of Whitman's verse came as a distinct shock to the majority.
Sometimes what he said was a greater shock, as, for instance, the line:—
"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
For a considerable time many people knew Whitman by this one line alone. They concluded that he was a barbarian and that all that he said was "yawp." Although much of his work certainly deserved this characterization, yet those who persisted in reading him soon discovered that their condemnation was too sweeping, as most were willing to admit after they had read, for instance, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, a poem that Swinburne called "the most sonorous nocturn yet chanted in the church of the world." The three motifs of this song are the lilac, the evening star, and the hermit thrush:—
"Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim."
In the same class we may place such poems as Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking, where we listen to a song as if from
"Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle."
Whitman also wrote in almost regular meter his dirge on Lincoln, the greatest dirge of the Civil War:—
"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting."