[In the following essay, Marriage compares Whitman's treatment of the theme of putrefaction with that of Charles Beaudelaire, concluding that “by dealing with the horror of the images of decay, these poets resurrect before man's eye the activity of life within death.”]

When I arrived in England I was appalled at the British attitude to death. To die seemed almost an act of indecency—if you have fallen so low as to die, then there were special people who would come, undertakers, to pack and wrap you up for the funeral …

Why is there this morbid attitude toward death? In a natural way one does not get rid of people through the back door! If death is nothing but defeat, the end of life, it is not pleasant to look [at the corpse] and think it will happen to them soon.

—Archbishop Anthony Bloom¹

Modern man harvests his crops and turns the remains back into the earth; he collects the refuse from his animals and processes it into fertilizer; he collects his own waste, processes it, and returns the effluence, by various means, back to nature; he boxes his own dead, or cremates them, and places the concealed remains in conspicuous places. Modern man is very methodical, very fastidious, very secular in his approach to anything that decays, that might cause disease. And although he handles it, talks about it, hides it, studies it, modern man never admits to any real perception or recognition of the offal world; except perhaps, in science, which is only natural, or in his literature. Even literature, however, for the most part does not deal explicitly with the corruption of flesh, even though death and the death experience are major themes in literature. Two modern poets, Charles Baudelaire and Walt Whitman, in contradiction to this last statement and to the abstract perceptions of decomposition after death, perceive the actual decay as a central image in ‘A Carrion,’ and ‘This Compost.’ Within these poems only the approach toward and treatment of the material surrounding either Baudelaire's ‘A Carrion’ or Whitman's ‘This Compost’ is different, for both men identify the rotting material as the major force projecting itself as image and as actual energy toward renewal within the poem.

‘A Carrion’² is a vividly depicted scene from Baudelaire's, the persona's, memory. The reader shares this remembrance with the persona and with the persona's lover. It is a lovely summer's day and beside the path there is a corpse in active process of decomposition beneath the sun's fiery heat, actively sweating, the cause of its own energy through putrefaction; flies swarm on it; maggots crawl out of it; a jealous bitch waits impatiently to tear flesh from it. The persona reminds his lover of the experience and then tells this ‘star of his eyes’: ‘And even you will come to this foul shame, / This ultimate infection.’ Then in the last stanza, the persona consoles the lover, saying that, although her beauty will be destroyed, the divine form and essence will live on in his poetry.

Like Baudelaire's poem, in its study of an active decomposition, Whitman's ‘This Compost’³ describes more than the central motivating force, the image of ‘diseas'd corpses.’ The persona begins by revolting against the earth, proceeds to question the earth about its ability to produce life when so filled with ‘distemper'd corpses.’ and then seeks to find evidence of the ‘foul meat’ beneath the surface. The persona, then, addresses the reader emphatically: ‘Behold this compost! behold it well! / Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!’ A listing of spring's marvelous display of regeneration follows this directive, a growth ‘above all those strata of sour dead.’ In amazement the persona goes on to list even more wonders of ‘chemistry’; the last stanza acknowledges terror of the earth, ‘calm and patient’ as ‘It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.’

These two poems, ‘A Carrion’ and ‘This Compost,’ prove the sensitivity of both artists to all of life, as death exists in life, and display the poets' ability to use even this data to portray a vision of the world. Either Baudelaire or Whitman could work with unrequited love or disintegration of the spiritual world, but they perceived within the decomposition of actual matter some shocking, intrinsically active depiction of all life, all love, all death in one image: surrounded by growth, jealousy, promise, energy, putrefaction, disease, poison, goodness, life: yet, no emptiness. Another poet, T. S. Eliot states, ‘But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.’⁴

By dealing with the horror of the images of decay, these poets resurrect before man's eye the activity of life within death. They do so not only by startling description or by use of emphatic language, but by making the poems themselves the actual carrion or compost. All that the reader observes on the page is the poem, both Whitman and Baudelaire know this, and so they refer to the poem as ‘A Carrion’/‘This Compost.’

The poem because of language use, description, and shocking imagery becomes for Baudelaire a swollen corpse with flies, maggots, and predatory beast. The poem is actually dead and bloated but lying in the path to arrest the reader's attention. What Baudelaire hopes is that the reader will be sensitive enough to see and hear, within the poem as image, the same intrinsic truth that he realized in the actual vision of the carrion he saw with his lover. Baudelaire describes his carrion so well that the reader, if it were not for the beauty of the language and form, might find it so repulsive as to make rereading impossible. The last lines of ‘A Carrion’ provide a description of the poem as a portrayal, a fixation of the corpse: ‘That I have kept the divine form and the essence / Of my festered loves inviolate.’ The last phrase, ‘De mes amours décomposés,⁵ probably refers to his Les Fleurs du Mal, as well as to the poem.

Whitman piles up layers of questions and statements, springtime lists and chemistry lists, separated by ‘distemper'd corpses … foul meat … sour dead … catching disease’; he constructs a compost—one that readers might ‘Behold,’ and translate into greater perceptions. ‘This Compost,’ also, closes with lines that leave ambiguous the poet's exact meaning: ‘It gives such divine material to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.’ ‘Divine materials,’ like ‘the divine form and the essence’ of ‘A Carrion’ are there for men to use, to resurrect, so that earth, and other men, have ‘leavings’ to accept. And as Les Fleurs du Mal relates to ‘A Carrion,’ Whitman's one book of poems, Leaves of Grass can be related to the last lines of ‘This Compost.’

Both poets, both poems provide the reader with a microcosmic world in themselves, but they also provide this little world of compost or carrion full of alteration, transformation, change, life in death, and resurrection beneficial to both the world of the poem and the actual world literally depicted.

Within these poems, as within the world, physical life is not the major sustaining drive or force that keeps the world alive. Death and subsequent decomposition fuel the main life sources and provide, during decay, a highly accelerated example of their immense force—this is the reason rotting material caught and held the poet's eye; it is the reason the image works so well to achieve within 48 lines for either poet the essence of cyclical regeneration. Life, itself, is a form of stasis, whether procreation occurs or not. At death, a singular life, which has been striving to maintain existence through energy absorbed from other life, as the flies or the bitch or ‘A Carrion’ strive, or the persona who finds the fruit so good in ‘This Compost’ strives, breaks down, slowly changes form until there is no recognizable form left. Yet that same life in death resurrects itself in other forms, both similar and different. The central theme of Whitman's poetry is based on this transformation. And the life which springs from the ‘sour dead,’ from the ‘hideous carrion,’ begins a period of stasis in life, until it is also used up and returns to the earth.⁶

The ancient Greeks were as interested in this cycle, in this life, death, decomposition, resurrection, new life phenomenon as modern men are. Many of modern man's myths and scientific understandings stem from simple paradigms, like the one present in Hesiod's treatment of Persephone: for six months of the year she reigns in Hades, for six months she resides on earth; for six months the world is dead, for six months the world is alive. This myth, this study and explanation of seasonal cycles, of natural regeneration and recession, recurs throughout man's literature. The myths have been formed; the epics have been written; the modern poet must sing out in a more compact, dynamic, exact song—or not be heard.

‘A Carrion’ and ‘This Compost’ provide this compact burning vision of death and transfiguration, of life rising out of death. Many other modern writers develop similar themes; for example, Dostoyevsky's seed falls many times within his great novel, yet the importance of his message works slowly to fruition. Dostoyevsky even confronts the paradox of the bodily corruption of the elder Father Zossima, whose holiness and piety were to save him from that corruption. But the importance of the corruption in The Brothers Karamazov pivots on the reaction of the other monks, visitors and especially Alyosha to the paradox created by their own hopes and beliefs. The chapter entitled ‘The Breath of Corruption’⁷ presents only the vermin or parasitical elements among the characters and does not in itself present a vision of the total chapter as a carrion. The decaying body is a breath, a spirit, fomenting unrest in the monastery and the village, but it does not provide the primary energy for the plot action within its corruption. Even the words, used to relate the event, do not provide an active corrupting force. Certain characters prey like scavengers on the bodily corruption, but only contrasting beliefs in the semiotic relevance of the decay are of importance to the author and the reader. Alyosha's ‘critical moment’⁸ is triggered, for instance, by his reaction to the elder's rapid decomposition.

In the 20th century, authors and poets, like Nikos Kazantzakis, develop themes involving death and decomposition. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel offers the reader a journey through numerous scenes of violent death, and aftermaths full of bloated dogs and vultures, smoldering funeral pyres, and bloodied swords. And in a memory that parallels Baudelaire's and Whitman's poems in both imagery and language, Odysseus recalls the visit he made with Rala to ‘… The burial glen to goad the embalmers. / Cadavers peeled and crumbled about their living feet, / the earth grew fat with too much food in her vast entrails / …’⁹ Kazantzakis' Odyssey, however, does not allow the destruction of flesh to carry the energy and song to the reader, for Odysseus on his journey through 33,333 lines dominates everything else in the book. In contrast Whitman's and Baudelaire's poems are immediate, and the power, the vision, the impact grow completely from the carrion or the compost. They fill up the reader's mouth with words, his mind with images, his imagination with an almost pulsing immediacy of life, death, decay, life in death, renewal.

It must be remembered that this vision of decay as a life giving force is relevant to the poems themselves, to Dostoyevsky's novel, and to Kanzantzakis' Odyssey. The poems regenerate within themselves the old myths, the forgotten forms; they are based on and grow out of decaying explanations of nature, rigid stories. The poets, like the ‘restless bitch,’ wait to snatch and to take away as their own, to absorb and to transform the forgotten decomposing stories, ideas, and motifs of man's literature, so that through them new life and a new vision of an old receding form might spring forth. And like the ‘restless bitch’ the reader then waits for the poet to leave the carrion, the compost.

This new vision is seen differently through each poet's concentration on inert cankerous matter. Whitman's reproduction of the world out of lifeless data requires a vast visionary conception of the seasonal cycles, the centuries of death and decomposition, the transformational capacities of air, earth, and water, and the earth's eternal purity. All of this must stem from a momentary revelation produced by active reception of the data inherent in a compost, translation of that data into actual results, and then imposition of that translation on to a greater, more universal scale.

In ‘This Compost’ the perception, translation, and imposition have already been made by the persona. Not until line 17 is the reader basically aware that the image before him is simply a compost, for there has occurred the rejection of a lover, questioning of the lover's (earth, woods, ocean, pasture) purity, of the lover's ability not to become diseased after receiving so many ‘distemper'd corpses,’ and finally a test prescribed to reassure the persona that he is not being deceived. Thomas-like in his doubting, the persona wants to ‘run a furrow with his plow … press his spade through the sod.’ Only after the persona's rejection, questioning, and testing does the reader ‘Behold this compost,’ and then within two lines must start to envision the inspirational resurrection of vegetation and new birth of animals (Persephone returns) in spring and summer. Following this list of awakenings the persona comments ‘The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above those strata of sour dead.’ After the reader has been asked to see in a compost two seasons and an abundance of growth out of ‘this compost,’ juxtaposition of the person's amazement at the lover's purity, and revulsion at the thought of rotting life still persists. Metaphorically, compost represents the essential energy, inherent in its corruption of life; energy that contains the seasons within its all encompassing decomposition and transformation. The persona extends his vision even further as he imagines ‘What chemistry!’ that the winds, the ocean, drinking water, fruits, and grasses do not infect, ‘That all is clean forever and forever.’ The metaphor finally evinces from the persona a feeling of awe as he perceives the whole world evolving out of this foulness—clean:

Now I am terrified at the earth, it is that calm and
          patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such
          endless
                              successions of diseas'd corpses.

Baudelaire's vision is not the weltanschauung that Whitman presents, but the reimaging of a certain scene becomes a little world within itself. The intensity and structure of the poetry, as it redepicts the scene, captures the reader and takes him in to a beautiful world born out of rottenness. A similarity, however, exists between the poems: Whitman's ‘stainless’ world grows out of the ‘sour dead’; Baudelaire's poetry creates an exquisite artificial world of ‘divine form and essence’ from ‘a hideous carrion.’ The persona of ‘A Carrion’ signs the glory of the corpse in decay, and through his song unfolds, like a flower, the sight and sound images, the similes, the metaphors, the rhythm and rhymes that eventually become the total reality of ‘A Carrion’—lying by a pathway on a summer day. Only toward the end of the poem does the persona leave the exact descriptive construction of this awful scene. In the last three verses he projects his lover into the image of ‘This ultimate infection / … Beyond the last sacrament.’ Not even the Holy Roman Church can prevent bodily corruption. The church can only anoint the body to save the lover's soul, but the poet, this poet, can create out of that corruption a greater beauty, can preserve his lover:

Speak, then, my beauty, to this dire putrescence,
               To the worm that shall kiss your proud estate
That I have kept the divine form and the essence
               Of my festered loves inviolate!(10)

Both Whitman and Baudelaire present the reader with images of mortification and decay. Out of each image, however, extends a greater perception of rotting life; that image translates into a world view, an artful creation: imposing on the reader a shocking awareness of data that lies wasted by self-blinding disinterest. Disinterest that through self love develops into a narrower and darker world. One must take a lover in order to reverse this darkness, for it is through the loving of others that one begins to perceive the corruption that awaits us all, that exists within, upon, out of, in hope of one's lover. Both poets experience the vision of corruption through and with a lover; perhaps only through conversation with a lover, or while listening to lovers converse, can we look upon corruption of life and accept its ultimate reality—decay of our loved bodies here on earth, while our energies proceed to some greater glory, while poets capture the continuity of disintegration in song.

Notes

1. Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), p. xvi. In 1958 Anthony Bloom was consecrated Bishop, and Archbishop in 1962, in charge of the Russian Church in Great Britain and Ireland. In 1963 he was also appointed Exarch of the Patriarch of Moscow in Western Europe, and in 1966 raised to the rank of Metropolitan.

2. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New York: New Directions, 1955), pp. 38-39.

3. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader's Edition, edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: Norton & Company, Inc., 1968), pp. 368-370. Blodgett and Bradley note: Compost: First published in LG [Leave of Grass] 1856 under the arresting title, “Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat”; appeared with revisions in LG 1860 as “Leaves of Grass” No. 4; present title in 1867, and completed text, 1881. The poem has undergone much revision, and a sizable MS fragment (Trent), printed in [Faint Clews and Indirections, edited by Clarence Gohdes and Rollo Silver (Durham: Duke University Press, 1949)] pp. 9-11, shows early stages’ (p. 368). A search for previous criticism of ‘This Compost’ revealed a one-page explication by Robert J. Griffin, ‘Whitman's “This Composte,”’ The Explicator, 29 (April 1963) 68. My paper appears to be the first extended criticism of this poem.

4. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1958), p. 106.

5. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947) pp. 70-71.

6. Thoreau noted this theme in his observations of a carrion in the Spring chapter of Walden: ‘We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion, which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of nature was my compensation for this.’ Blodgett and Bradley note (pp. 368-369) that this was published just two years before Leaves of Grass.

7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnet (New York: The Modern Library), p. 343.

8. Dostoyevsky, p. 354.

9. Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, translated by Kimon Friar (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1958), p. 349.

10. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, p. 39. This stanza is difficult to translate and the meaning is carried more effectively in the French:

    Alors, ô ma beaute! dites a la vermine
                        Qui vous mangera de baisers,
    Que j'ai garde la forme et l'essence divine
                        De mes amours décomposés!

    [Les Fleurs du Mal. p. 71.]