leaves
of grass p o e ms e v o ke d b y n a tu r e
WA LT WH ITM A N , 18 5 5 selected by Reilly Claflin
leaves
of grass po e ms e v o ke d b y n a tu r e
WA LT WH ITM A N , 1855 selected by Reilly Claflin
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman Smiles for Ryellz Publishing ©2017
contents
table of Forward
1
The First Dandelion
2
Kosmos
3
The World Below the Brine
5
A Promise to California
The First Dandelion
6
In Cabin'd Ships at Night 10
On the Beach at Night Alone
The Voice of Rain
8
9
12
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
13
Index
15
Walt Whitman published his first edition of “Leaves of Grass� in 1855. He continued to add to and revise the collection until his death, where at that point it amassed over 400 works. Here are ten of those poems.
1
dandelion the first
Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging, As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been, Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden, calm as the dawn, The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.
On March 12th, 1888, The New York Herald, a popular newspaper, ran “The First Dandelion” to celebrate the coming of spring. Unfortunately that happened to be the worst day of the Blizzard of 1888. The poem was parodied with a piece titled “The First Blizzard” in a following newspaper.
kosmos Who includes diversity and is Nature, Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also, Who has not look'd forth from the win dows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover, Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual, Who having consider'd the body finds all its organs and parts good,
Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories, The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States; Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons, Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.
3
tears Tears! Tears! Tears! In the night, in solitude, tears, On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand, Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate, Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head; O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears? What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand? Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! O wild and dismal night storm, with wind—O belching and desperate! O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace, But away at night as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosen’d ocean, Of tears! tears! tears!
the brine the world below
The world below the brine, Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves, Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle openings, and pink turf, Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water, Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers, Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray, Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do, The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere, The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, 5
locomoti
to a
Thee for my recitative, Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining, Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance, Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front, Thy long, pale, floating vaporpennants, tinged with delicate purple, 6
The dense and murky clouds outbelching from thy smoke-stack, Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels, Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following, Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering; Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent, For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee, With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow, By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
ive in winter By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Fierce-throated beauty!
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.
Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all, Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
At the time Walt Whitman wrote “To a Locomotive in Winter”, science vs. art was a common subject of debate. Whitman, however, thought they could go hand in hand, as expressed by the line “merge in verse”.
7
on the beach
at night alone On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
california
a promise to A promise to California, Or inland to the great pastoral Plains, and on to Puget sound and Oregon; Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love, For I know very well that I and robust love belong among you, inland, and along the Western sea;
During the 1860s, Walt Whitman’s poetry, like large sum of the population of the United States, became very concerned and almost obsessed with the concept of western expansion, or the “manifest destiny�, of the nation.
For these States tend inland and toward the Western sea, and I will also.
9
in cabin’d In cabin’d ships at sea, The boundless blue on every side expanding, With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves, Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine, Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails, She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under many a star at night, By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
10
ship
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said, The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet, We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion, The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables, The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm, The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
In full rapport at last.
And this is ocean’s poem.
Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,
ps at sea You not a reminiscence of the land alone, You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos’d I know not whither, yet ever full of faith, Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!
Whitman associated land with stability and calmness and the ocean with uncertainity and unending change. This poem is one of many he wrote with this theme.
Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it here in every leaf;) Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the imperious waves, Chant on, sail on, bear o’er the boundless blue from me to every sea, This song for mariners and all their ships.
11
rain
the voice of
And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower, Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice And forever, by day and night, I give of the rain, back life to my own origin, and make pure and beautify it; Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea, (For song, issuing from its birthplace, after fulfilment, Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely wandering, form’d, altogether changed, and yet the same, Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.) I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
12
i saw in louisiana a
live-oak growing I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide in a wide flat Without any companion it grew there space, uttering joyous of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not. But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Though Walt Whitman lived primarily in New York and New Jersey, he did spend some of time in Louisiana. He even compares the oak tree to himself, leading the reader to wonder if this poem has an autobiographical significance.
bibliography Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Project Gutenberg Ebook. Release date: August 24, 2008 [EBook #1322]
index a
A Promise to California:
i
9
In Cabin'd Ships at Sea: 10 I Saw in Lousiana a Live-Oak Growing:
k
Kosmos:
o
3
On the Beach at Night Alone:
8
t
Tears: 4 The First Dandelion: 2 The World Below the Brine: The Voice of Rain: 12 To a Locomotive in Winter:
5 6
13