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‘O so loth to depart!’: Whitman's Reluctance to Conclude

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SOURCE: “‘O so loth to depart!’: Whitman's Reluctance to Conclude,” in American Transcendental Quarterly: A Journal of New England Writers, Vol. 7, No. 1, March, 1993, pp. 77-90.

[In the following essay, Dean explores Whitman's difficulty in coming to a conclusion and facing temporality as evidenced in his poetry, noting that he does finally succeed in accepting endings in his First Annex: Sands at Seventy.]

Like most of us, Walt Whitman found taking leave difficult. Though justly famous for his settings out, he faced the challenge of concluding his engagement with his themes, his readers, his poem, and his life. “After the Supper and Talk,” from which I've taken my title, expresses Whitman's keen awareness of his reluctance to conclude, “his final withdrawal prolonging.” Written in 1887 and situated as the concluding poem in First Annex: Sands at Seventy, this poem clearly concerns the “final withdrawal” from writing and from life. Not surprisingly, as Whitman grew older he exhibited anxiety over conclusions. Yet from the beginning of his career, long before his “final withdrawal” seemed imminent, parting and death were predominant themes in his work. Whitman's insistence on an organic and democratic poetry (in his view, naturally connected) complicates his themes of parting and death, for Whitman was committed to perpetuating this poetry embodying his vision of democracy, not bringing it to conclusion.

Since Whitman viewed his poetry as organic and democratic, the problem of concluding presented a technical, as well as thematic, challenge. Whitman, while eschewing prescribed verse forms and strict metrical patterns, nevertheless must determine the conclusion of a poem presumably equal to its organic content. To rephrase the challenge of conclusion as a question in political terms, what does Whitman, in a democratic—egalitarian, inclusive—poetry, privilege with the emphasis of conclusion when the determined conclusion of any organic content must be arbitrary? The constructedness of conclusions reveals an author's temporality with the effect of separating the author from his or her subject matter. Thus, Whitman, believing he and his poems should be one with the subject, resists conclusion.

Early in his career, Whitman generally attempts to mask his temporality through a reliance on metaphors as symbols. These poems' “conclusions” evade concluding by stopping in a continuous present, regressing from conclusion, or projecting beyond conclusion, often by casting the temporal in terms of spacial dimensions. However, the challenge of what to make of conclusion, intensified by Whitman's experience in, and near obsession over, the Civil War (with its lasting effect of severing the past from the present), followed by his failing personal health, could not finally be evaded. I suggest this challenge, a question of form, history, and personal anxiety, drove Whitman from a conception of poetry as organic to a conception of poetry as artifact. His later poetry exhibits a greater self-consciousness—an unmasking of his temporality—and Whitman makes many attempts at approaching conclusion through the use of metaphor as allegory. Such an allegorical attitude features, in Craig Owens' description, two fundamental impulses: “a conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present” (203). Focusing on several of Whitman's poems and his prose reflections on poetry, I examine his several strategies of evasion of temporality and conclusion, and his eventual meeting of the challenge of concluding, to demonstrate Whitman's subtle, and perhaps not fully conscious, changing perception of the nature of his poetry.

As his retention of the title Leaves of Grass from the beginning to the end of his career suggests, Whitman persisted in his conception of an organic poetics. In the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves, he asserts:

The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things, … but is the life of these things and much else and is in the soul. … The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent.1

(716)

This suggests that the style is the “free growth” from subject. And, as Whitman proclaimed “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (711), he wished to allow an organic, democratic style growing from his subject of a democratic America.2 In arguing that poetry naturally grew with its subject, he actually tended to de-emphasize style: “The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself” (719). An organic poetry seeks to deny temporality, deny that writing is posterior to experience. Thus, as David Simpson notes, Whitman “constantly claims an immediacy or objectivity for his words, as if in the moment of utterance (or writing) they are or could become the things they denote” (178).

An organic poetry may be viewed as democratic since the poet presumably allows expression of subject unfiltered by arbitrary form. Whitman means to be inclusive, passively allowing expression of the subject, not judging the subject. Simpson discusses this inclusiveness and intended lack of judgment in relation to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

The author's name is buried unpretentiously in the stream of language, embodying the poet's claim to be speaking from within rather than from above his America. In the prose as in the poetry, Whitman's favorite mode of punctuation is the string of stops (…), denoting a voice or sentence that can potentially go on forever, and a field of inclusion or agglomeration that is infinite.

(179)

However, poems cannot go on forever, nor can they include everything. How poems conclude always reflects a poet's judgment, what Robert Hass calls the poet's “making.”

Hass, in “Listening and Making,” explores the prosody of free verse and, in Whitmanesque fashion, asserts, “… rhythm is always revolutionary ground. It is always the place where the organic rises to abolish the mechanical and where energy announces the abolition of tradition. New rhythms are new perceptions” (108). Distinguishing between rhythm and rhythmic form, Hass continues:

A rhythm is not a rhythmic form; in theory, at least, a rhythmic sequence, like some poetry readings, can go on forever, the only limits being the attention of the auditor and the endurance of the performer. … Daydream and hypnotic rhythm have it in common that their natural form is exhaustion. The resolution of rhythmic play, not just coming down on one side or the other but the articulation of what ending feels like, is active making.

(118-119)

Working from these suppositions Hass suggests, “the free-verse poem, by stripping away familiar patterns of recurrence and keeping options open, is able to address the forms of closure with the sense that there are multiple possibilities …” (123).3 Here Hass describes precisely the challenge I believe Whitman faced while following his impulse for an organic and democratic poetry.

In the early editions of Leaves, as passive inclusiveness receives thematic emphasis, the formal properties of the verse reveal a deliberate attempt at stasis, a deferral of progress and, thus, of conclusion; Whitman conveys “listening” without “making.” With an examination of two of Whitman's most often quoted lines I wish to clarify how several of Whitman's verse techniques attempt deferment:

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of
          summer grass.

([1]. 4-5)

For all the energy of the poem, the lines affect to slow time, to draw out the moments, to present the moments as a moment and deny temporality. The two lines consist of three parts joined together by various techniques. Grammatically, the two lines are two sentences. However, by endstopping the first line with a comma rather than a semi-colon or period, Whitman—relying on parataxis—presents the two sentences as one. A large number of Whitman's lines are endstopped, and he needs an endstop here to set off the sections for rhythmic purposes. The first line and the first part of the two-part second line are joined by the rhythm, each possessing three beats emphasized by the alliteration of the “l” sound.4

The rhythm now having been established, the second part of the two-part second line fulfills the stanza by changing the rhythm; here the alliteration of the sibilants foreground the surprisingly even-spaced four beats. Despite the change of rhythm, this final section of the two lines is connected to the previous parts. Gay Wilson Allen points out that the string of periods (“…”)—a technique borrowed from oratorical practice—“serves both as a caesura and to suggest a continuation of the thought” (155). The string of periods in the second line, then, functions much like the comma in the line break by connecting the pauses. The last part of the two lines is also connected to the previous parts by the repetition of sound, again the “s” sound. The sibilant of “soul” and “ease,” occupying only the final position of the first two sections of these lines, becomes predominant in the third section and is evident in every stress. The word “summer,” the only adjective in the two lines, announces the themes of these lines and, indeed, the whole poem by expanding the rhythm of the line.

These lines convey a sense of a dilated moment, of a moment expanding, without time passing, into fulfillment; the line length grows, the rhythm expands, and sounds coalesce. Of course, while never permanently set in a time and place, this is a summer poem. The speaker, addressing “my soul” ([5]. 73), recalls how “we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning” ([5]. 78) and presents an invitation:

Loafe with me on the grass … loose the stop from
          your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want … not custom
          or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

([5]. 75-77)

The poem attempts to project the past “transparent summer morning” into the present and lull it into remaining. Certainly, the speaker addresses death and suffering, but only to translate them into “summer grass.” Founded on principles of organicism, expressing an organic theme, the poem can only be concluded arbitrarily.

But of course “Song of Myself” doesn't conclude; after seeming that it may go on forever (“like some poetry readings”), it just stops, suspending its activity:

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you

([52]. 1334-1336)

“Some where” could be anywhere, and with this Whitman refuses to come to conclusion.

Another 1855 poem, [“The Sleepers”], exemplifies Whitman's attempt to make progress and his final regression. Viewing the poem as a psychological quest for manhood, Edwin Haviland Miller describes the movement of the poem: “… the quest is basically illusory. New situations are only variations upon earlier situations, and the ‘I’ invariably retreats to the protected position of the child or of the fetus” (78-79). In the final section of the poem the sleepers “pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of night and awake” ([8]. 194). While the sleepers “awake” in the present tense, the speaker, differentiated from the sleepers, regresses into the past so that his waking may be put off to the future. The 1855 edition of the poem concludes:

I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return
          to you;
Not you will yield forth the dawn again more surely
          than you will yield forth me again,
Not the womb yields the babe in its time more surely
          than I shall be yielded from you in my time.

([8]. 202-204)

Certainly the first line here suggests a cycle, and “again” in the second line reinforces this idea. But the second two lines attempt to de-emphasize the return, because it signals regression. Furthermore, the second two lines, though parallel in construction, exhibit a movement from metaphoric to a more literal language. Nature may “yield forth” dawns daily, but “the womb yields the babe” a very limited number of times. The speaker “shall” face being yielded forth “in my time,” but not yet.

One technique these early poems share is Whitman's employment of the catalogue. Mark Kinkead-Weekes laments what he calls Whitman's “democratic syntax” because “… nothing it [the voice] says can be intrinsically any more important than any other thing” (44). Kinkead-Weekes continues, “but it is not merely that the lines are equal, so that the syntactical relation between them can only be ‘and’; it follows also that the order of the lines cannot be important” (45). Kinkead-Weekes is primarily criticizing Whitman's catalogues, and, since endings require discrimination (a choice of emphasis), his point raises the question of how an inclusionary, democratic poetry could conclude. Whitman's catalogues, simply by their length, defer conclusion. And, significantly, the catalogues always appear in the middle of poems. Furthermore, after 1860 the catalogues disappear from his poems completely. Roger Asselineau notes this disappearance and suggests it “probably corresponds to the decline in his faculty of wonder. From this date on, he could write a poem only after a shock—until then his subject was the world, the ‘ensemble,’ and he descended from the whole to the parts” (103-104). M. Wynn Thomas finds “the catalogue rhetoric works throughout, as so frequently in Whitman's poetry, to represent American society not as a particular historical phenomenon, but as the supreme expression of the inexhaustible vitality of nature” (80). It is hardly surprising that the Civil War made it more difficult for Whitman to naturalize (to mystify) history and to view his poems as a natural outgrowth.

Already in the middle of his life when he began Leaves of Grass, Whitman, with the crisis of the Civil War intensifying, would begin to regard endings, and what to make of them, more seriously. By 1860, in “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” he could conceive of his poems as “little corpses” (4. 57), hardly an image of natural growth. And, as Allen reminds us, with the 1860 edition “Whitman began the experimentation in revision and rearrangement of his poems that he was to continue for the next twenty years” (245). Whitman's considerations of the arrangement of the book heightened the challenge of conclusion, and Whitman's conception of his poetry began to shift subtly.

“So Long,” a poem about concluding, stands in the closing position in every edition of Leaves of Grass from 1860 on. Here Whitman evades conclusion by attempting to project himself beyond conclusion. The first line announces his intention: “To conclude, I announce what comes after me” (1). But before projecting into the future, Whitman casts back:

I remember I said before my leaves sprang at all,
I would raise my voice jocund and strong with
          reference to consummations.

(2-3)

He suggests he has carried out his intentions, and, “when America does what was promis'd” (4), then “fruitation” (8) will occur. The poem neglects the wasting period between “fruitation” and conclusion completely: “while my pleasure is yet at the full I whisper So long!” (13). So, taking leave in his prime, Whitman searches for a way out and explores several possibilities. He considers claiming spiritual transcendence:

So I pass, a little time vocal, visible, contrary,
Afterward a melodious echo, passionately bent for,
          (death making me really undying,)
The best of me then when no longer visible, for toward
          that I have been incessantly preparing.

(46-48)

One “melodious echo” evident in the poem is the repeated “So long!” which Whitman uses as a refrain. In its first instance, it announces his departure; in its recurring instances, it reminds us of his presence, of his deferring departure. Though Whitman claims to be moving toward what he has “been incessantly preparing,” he characteristically pulls back with two questions:

What is there more, that I lag and pause and crouch
          extended with unshut mouth?
Is there a single final farewell?

(49-50)

He lags, fearing the consequences of being “no longer visible.” To combat this fear, he attempts to give the body the properties for which he has privileged the soul, and, in a kind of poetic transubstantiation, would literally embrace future readers:

My songs cease, I abandon them,
From behind the screen where I hid I advance
          personally solely to you.
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man. …

(51-54)

Significantly, Whitman reveals a new conception of his songs. He presents his songs in the figure of a screen behind which he has been hiding. Here he seems to be dismissing the artifice of words and poems (songs) arranged in a book. But this is not the end.

The final verse paragraph of the poem begins tenderly, raises hope, allows doubt, and ends in stunning confusion:

Dear friend whoever you are take this kiss,
I give it especially to you, do not forget me,
I feel like one who has done work for the day
          to retire for awhile,
I receive now again of my many translations, from my
          avataras ascending, while others doubtless
          await me,
An unknown sphere more real than I dream'd, more
          direct, darts awakening rays about me, So long!
Remember my words, I may again return,
I love you, I depart from materials,
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.

(64-71)

Curiously, though the speaker departs “from materials,” the emphasis falls on the material, the “kiss,” “works,” and “words.” This song, rather than functioning as a screen hiding the speaker, functions as a screen on which the image of the speaker remains. Employing the figure of the screen and relying on words for his preservation, Whitman begins to reveal his conception of poetry as an artifact. His memory may triumph only in dead words.

By 1865 Whitman more openly exhibits concern with his artistry, exerting authorial control in his changing style of the newer poems, his revision of older material and his ordering of individual poems. While preparing Drum-Taps for possible publication, Whitman discussed his work in a letter of January 6, 1865, to William Douglas O'Connor. He states of Drum-Taps:

It is in my opinion superior to Leaves of Grass—certainly more perfect as a work of art, being adjusted in all its proportions, & its passion having the indispensable merit that though to the ordinary reader, let loose with wildest abandon, the true artist can see it is yet under control.

(Correspondence, 1: 246)

This emphasis on control simply isn't present in the 1855 edition. By 1865 Whitman has been revising poems, rearranging the order of Leaves, and, as his letter to O'Connor suggests, considering the possibility that Leaves of Grass is complete. In exerting control, Whitman is considering conclusions.

While Whitman finally decided Leaves was not complete, Michael Moon notes Whitman's significant change of attitude in regard to incorporating new material into Leaves:

… Whitman began to make a distinction which would remain crucial throughout the rest of his career between what he seems to have considered two different ways of revising the volume that had become his life-project. Instead of incorporating “Drum-Taps” directly into the fourth edition [1867] of Leaves of Grass as a “cluster,” Whitman made it the first of what he at that point began to call “annexes” to his volume: relatively small, occasional collections of his verse which he integrated into Leaves by adding them intact at the end of the volume, rather than integrating them into the text by means of his earlier “organic” model of inserting them. …

(199)

Although Whitman continued, until the final arrangement of 1881, to incorporate the clusters into Leaves, Moon correctly reasons that Whitman is already questioning his conception of his poetry as organic.

Whitman's changing style during this period further signals this shift in conception. As has been often noted, Whitman employed more uniform stanzaic patterns from this period on. John E. Schwiebert asserts, “the stanzaic form embodies the ordering process itself,” and Whitman uses this ordering to confront “the complexities of advancing age and his war-haunted memory” (128). Cristanne Miller, too, finds Whitman employing regular meter in an effort to exert control. She notes that an “increased regularity in line length and iambic foot patterns tends to occur at points of ambiguity or tension under superficial control, … and also in moments of stabilization and conclusion” (306). Miller's choice of the word “superficial” indicates her belief (and dismay) that Whitman's style no longer organically expresses his content. The word choice suggests a discontinuity between surface and depth, with Whitman, no longer one with his content, exerting control from above. Furthermore, to the great displeasure of many readers, Whitman exerts control backward as well in his revisions. Malcolm Cowley, defending his belief in the superiority of the 1855 edition, laments the revisions made in subsequent editions and complains of Whitman's growing self-consciousness.5 Though Whitman made changes in each edition, Cowley is most disturbed by revisions made in 1881 when “Song of Myself” was given its present title. Cowley argues:

In the first edition the poet-hero … had spoken compulsively and without self-consciousness. In the late editions, however, he also “sings”—which in Whitman's jargon means “write a song about”—himself. When he observes the miraculous world about him, it is no longer for the pure joy of seeing, as in the first edition, but also with the intention of collecting material. … If the poet is consciously trying to hear sounds that will enrich the texture of his song, he is no longer being passive. …

(xxxiv)

Cowley objects to the separation of the persona from the poet as well as the shaping intentions of the poet this separation reveals. This suggests that Whitman's voice is now shown to be a series of sentences supplementary to the originary experience. Cowley's objection rests on the belief that writing is subordinate to speech. But, Craig Owens points out, “it is of course within the same philosophic tradition which subordinates writing to speech that allegory is subordinated to the symbol” (215). Cowley aptly describes the change Whitman's poetics underwent at this time. That Whitman revised his poems may or may not be lamentable, but the shift in attitude that impelled Whitman to make the changes he made, I believe, was inevitable.

By the end of his career, this change became more evident. In “A Backward Glance O'er Travell'd Roads,” written in 1889, Whitman accurately describes his backward glance: “These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations, with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments” (562). For the most part Whitman's essay emphasizes “first purposes” and intentions. He persisted in proclaiming that his poetry was organic and that his subject, his time and place, demanded new forms. He explicitly relates his poetry to America: “Behind all else that can be said, I consider ‘Leaves of Grass’ and its theory experimental—as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory” (562-563). Less prevalent in this essay but more prevalent in the poetry is “the warp of experience.”

Significantly, the essay appears in an Annex of Leaves. While retaining the title, Whitman changes the metaphor for the poems by adding inscriptions and annexes to the book. M. Wynn Thomas registers this change of metaphor when he comments, “although it was to the rank profusion of natural life that Whitman had, with a sure instinct, turned for a title for his life's work, he could not, at the end, forbear from also thinking of Leaves of Grass as a kind of city” (177).6 Rather than suggesting an organic structure—how could it end?—the rearrangement of the book suggests that the poems are rooms or buildings in which the thoughts of the poet lie preserved. (Interestingly, Allen points out that Whitman, in the last year of his life, had a mausoleum constructed [540].) The controlling metaphor is architectural and the emphasis falls on thoughtful construction.7 This new controlling metaphor indicates a change in Whitman's conception of his poetry from symbolic, with its claim of organicism, to allegorical, which depends on artifice. Paul de Man, discussing early romantic literature, questions the conception of an organic poetry and its use of the symbol, preferring instead a demystified, self-conscious poetry employing allegory:

Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. In doing so, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self.

(191)

Whitman's notoriety for his blustering late optimism is only partially deserved; a number of his later poems admit temporality and make it clear that the present is different from the idealized past. By admitting temporality, Whitman allows the late poems to address the real possibility of parting, making necessary the construction of a conclusion.

As early as 1860, when Whitman recalls a ship wreck in “Thought,” he concludes by expressing doubt that the non-self is a translation of the self: “Are souls drown'd and destroy'd so? / Is only matter triumphant?” (9-10). Here Whitman exhibits the allegorical attitude where only the form, not the life, of things persists. Whitman further allegorizes the poem in the 1871 supplement Passage to India, suggesting he is thinking of a particular boat by adding the line: “Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President” (4). The boat in question, the steamer President, disappeared in 1841 (453: n. 4), but, given the date of this revision, one can't help reading this as an allusion to the fate of Lincoln. With this constellation of two historical events (the disappearance of a ship and the death of Lincoln) connected in name only, Whitman writes an allegory of the nation preserved in form as an intact union but which lacks a captain.

To be sure, many of Whitman's late poems exhibit increased religiocity and refer to a spiritual sailing. This spiritual sailing can be read as the expected opposing extreme in allegorical thinking, which Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues depends on a “dualistic metaphysics, an absolute split between force and form, which renders the body of the poem an imprisoning mechanism” (8). In “The Dismantled Ship” from Sands at Seventy, Whitman figures himself caught in the lifeless form of a ship. In describing the anchored ship, he alludes to himself in old age:

An old, dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled,
          done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up
          at last and hawser'd tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.

(3-5)

Here, Whitman confines himself in the logic of his own extended metaphor and acknowledges, without evasion, his own temporality.

Whitman combines his anxiety over his diminishing health, figured as a ship in “The Dismantled Ship,” with his fear that the ship of state has lost its force, as suggested in “Thought,” in “The Dying Veteran”—also belonging to Sands at Seventy and first published in 1887. The poem explicitly compares the past with the present and rages against the evident rift between the two. Significantly, the rift is not recent, but is perceived as having occurred well before the Civil War, as the headnote insists: “[A Long Island incident—early part of the present century].” Here Whitman admits the gap between the past and the present—or, in the view of Thomas' political analysis, between the artisanal phase and the post-artisanal phase (71)—the gap Whitman had in his earlier work attempted to mystify with various attempts at detemporalization.

The dying veteran of the poem calls out for the old days. The dying veteran is, of course, a double of Whitman. Whitman, in the present, finds himself constrained in a kind of formalism: “Amid these days of order, ease, prosperity, / Amid the current songs of beauty, peace, decorum” (1-2). So constrained and desiring authentic life, Whitman announces “I cast a reminiscence” (3). Though the veteran is a figure Whitman claims to remember from childhood, and though the veteran is said to have fought “under Washington himself” (5), ironically the veteran is no less confined by decorous form than Whitman, for the veteran “lay dying—sons, daughters, church-deacons, lovingly tending him” (8). The poem concludes with the veteran raging against the form of life: “‘Away with your life of peace!—your joys of peace! / Give me my old wild battle-life again!’” (17-18). The veteran's desire is Whitman's desire, and the veteran speaks for Whitman as well as for himself in desiring to return to the originary and defining moment of America—“the Revolutionary war” (7).

Though one may say the veteran and Whitman speak together, there is a difference. The poem is recognizably allegorical. Typical of allegories, this poem seems to contain its own interpretation, for Whitman inserts authorial comment on the reminiscence: “(likely 'twill offend you, / I heard it in my boyhood)” (3-4). Thus, the commentary suggests that the veteran's criticism of the post-Revolutionary War period is Whitman's criticism of the post-Civil War period. But while the veteran can recall fighting with Washington, Whitman's “old wild battle-life” is the period the veteran criticizes. The poem insists on a more radical temporality than perhaps Whitman had intended. Criticizing the present by attempting to remember a more authentic life in childhood, Whitman reveals that his whole life is belated when he can only recall an older dying man's memory of authentic life. Whitman's text can only allude to another text, to a story he had heard. To rephrase Owens' description of the allegorical impulse, Whitman, in desiring to redeem the past for the present, succeeds only in further establishing the remoteness of the past.

First Annex: Sands at Seventy concludes with “After the Supper and Talk,” and here Whitman owns up to his temporality and squarely faces the challenge of conclusion. The poem describes a friend parting with a friend, and the parting is clearly a metaphor for death: “A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more” (6). The poem baldly announces the difference between the past and present through negation: “no more will they meet, / No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young” (4-5). Since the poem is about two friends parting, it is comprised of pairs, either paired lines or paired sections of single lines. Words, too, often repeat to form pairs: “as a friend from friends” (2), “Good-bye and good-bye” (3), and “loth, O so loth to depart!” (11). The repetitions are also an undisguised attempt to buy time, “seeking to ward off the last word ever so little” (7) and “Something to eke out a minute additional” (9). The first eleven lines of this twelve line poem form one sentence. The second sentence, really an incomplete sentence, concludes the poem: “Garrulous to the very last” (12). It's an odd line in every way. The line sticks, as if Whitman has prolonged the act one line beyond what we thought possible. And the tone saves the poem from mere sentimentality. It may produce admiration at his persistence, or annoyance at this man who won't be quiet. But formally, this is the end. Separated by an emphatic endstop, subjectless, incomplete, a half-line unpaired, a fragment, the line reveals Whitman facing the challenge, which he loathed, of coming to conclusion.

Notes

  1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett, eds. (New York: Norton, 1973), 536; 2. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to Whitman's poetry and prose come from this text. References will be noted parenthetically by section number followed by line numbers for the poetry and by page number for the prose.

  2. Of course Whitman's historical context is always being reconstructed, and the question of what kind of democratic America Whitman desired remains seriously contested. M. Wynn Thomas persuasively argues that “the period which Whitman then [the 1850s] as later, regarded as the age of the political giants before the flood was that of his own childhood and early manhood; the period when it was still possible to regard Jacksonianism as a natural and desirable development of Jeffersonian democracy” (74). Thomas suggests that, before the Civil War, Whitman tries “to bring the artisanal and post-artisanal phases he had known together into a single imaginative synthesis …” (71). After the war, Thomas sees in Whitman's work “a new and deeply moving contrary tendency to recognize aspects of the past as irretrievably lost” (236). Thus, articulation of the past becomes less a serious critical position and serves more openly to signal temporality.

  3. In “Listening and Making,” though primarily concerned with twentieth-century free verse, Hass does discuss Whitman's “Farm Picture.” I take the time to present Hass's thoughts on free verse and closure because they seem particularly relevant to Whitman's poetry. My study arises out of a desire to test their relevancy.

  4. In my analysis of these lines, I rely on the following critics in regards to scansion. Sculley Bradley has argued that Whitman's method is loosely accentual (438). Finding in Whitman's poetry “affinities with old strong stress meter of Beowulf, including the heavy alliteration” (1607), Roger Mitchell suggests “the key to the scansion of Whitman's poetry is the caesura. … he uses the caesura to break the line into various grammatical types” (1607). Following these critics Rosemary L. Gates sees Whitman's use of caesuras, what she calls “the boundaries of the sound unit,” enabling him to successfully employ his unusually long lines. Gates points out “the number of prominent points in a line of free verse rarely exceeds four … [because] the complexity of the string of words in the poetic context requires the information to be broken into smaller chunks” (250). In this way Gates suggests that the long line consists of shorter units which present rhythmical patterns.

  5. C. Carroll Hollis, acknowledging Cowley's lead, also laments a shift in Whitman's poetry from the 1865 edition onward. Believing that the poems of the first three editions are founded on oratory, Hollis argues “that when Whitman later tried to emphasize the lyrical aspect of the poem [“Song of Myself”] he did so by de-emphasizing its oratorical base” (53). Hollis suggests this shift had negative results: “he no longer spoke with and for the people, his presumed audience, but for himself” (64).

  6. Thomas makes this comment after pointing to an 1889 letter in which Whitman describes his “big book”: “it is such ensemble—like a great city to modern civilization, and a whole combined paradoxical identity a man, a woman” (Correspondence 4: 299).

  7. Michael Moon reads this metaphor slightly differently, finding the suggestion of “the annexation of new territories” (200).

Works Cited

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Book. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1962.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Bradley, Sculley. “The Fundamental Metrical Principles in Whitman's Poetry.” American Literature 10 (1939): 437-459.

Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. By Walt Whitman. New York: Viking, 1959. viii-xxxvii.

de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Rpt. in Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969. 173-209.

Gates, Rosemary L. “The Identity of American Free Verse: The Prosodic Study of Whitman's ‘Lilacs.’” Language and Style: An International Journal 18 (1985): 248-276.

Hass, Robert. “Listening and Making.” Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. New York: Ecco Press, 1984. 107-133.

Hollis, C. Carroll. Language and Style inLeaves of Grass.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “Walt Whitman Passes the Full-Stop by …” Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London: Vision Press, 1985. 43-60.

Miller, Cristanne. “The Iambic Pentameter Norm of Whitman's Free Verse.” Language and Style: An International Journal 15 (1982): 289-324.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Mitchell, Roger. “A Prosody for Whitman?” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 84 (1969), 1606-1612.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality inLeaves of Grass.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” October. 12 (Spring 1980): 67-86, and 13 (Summer 1980): 59-80. Rpt. in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. Boston: Godine, 1984.

Schwiebert, John E. “A Delicate Balance: Whitman's Stanzaic Poems.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 7 (1990): 116-130.

Simpson, David. “Destiny made manifest: the styles of Whitman's poetry.” Rpt. in Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 177-196.

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Eds. Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973.

———. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1959.

———. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 5 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1961.

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