SOURCE: “Structure and Meaning in Whitman's Sea-Drift,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 53, Winter, 1982, pp. 49-66.

[In the following essay, Fast examines Whitman's Sea-Drift poems as a whole, focusing on how their organization within the larger Leaves of Grass helps to develop the overall themes of self-exploration and the promise of transcendence.]

Criticism of Whitman's Sea-Drift sequence has been almost entirely limited to analyses of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life.” Although many critics have commented on the contrasts between these two poems, none has thoroughly examined Sea-Drift as a whole. Instead, critics have noted the presence of sea imagery,¹ or have made general statements about themes. For example, James E. Miller states that Sea-Drift develops the theme of the self and time, achieving hope through mystic evolution, and T. E. Crawley finds these poems representing an introspective voyage into the unknown.² None of the critics, though, undertakes to show exactly how the poems achieve such effects, or indicates that the arrangement of the poems as a group contributes to the development of the themes. Gay Wilson Allen perhaps first voiced the assumption on which this neglect has been based when he minimized the organizational coherence of the sequence.³ However, Allen and others have observed that the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, in which Sea-Drift first appeared in its final form, is notable primarily for Whitman's rearrangements of previously published poems.⁴ In fact, analysis of the Sea-Drift poems as Whitman arranged them in 1881 reveals not only that thematic relationships do exist among them, but that the themes are progressively developed and enriched by their organization.

Whitman first grouped some of these poems together in Sea-Shore Memories, a cluster that appeared in the 1871 Passage to India,⁵ and included seven of the eleven 1881 Sea-Drift poems: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life” (in 1871, “Elemental Drifts”), “Tears,” “Aboard at a Ship's Helm,” “On the Beach at Night,” “The World below the Brine,” and “On the Beach at Night Alone.” The poems that appear in both clusters are arranged identically in each, and with some important exceptions (noted below), their texts are essentially the same. Thus the thematic development of the clusters is similar. However, the addition of “To the Man-of-War-Bird” between “Tears” and “Aboard at a Ship's Helm,” and of three final poems, as well as revisions in “Out of the Cradle” and “As I Ebb'd,” make Sea-Drift a more complete and stronger sequence, one which demonstrates the care and skill with which, even late in life, Whitman constructed his book. As I am primarily interested in how the Sea-Drift poems function together as a unit, all quotations and references to the poems, unless otherwise noted, will be from the texts in the 1892 printing of Leaves of Grass, which preserved the Sea-Drift sequence as established in 1881.⁶

The sequence of poems following “Out of the Cradle” tests and confirms the insights achieved in that poem and increases the demands of the poetic vocation. In “As I Ebb'd” and “Tears,” the narrator is engulfed in the doubts and anguish he acknowledged in “Out of the Cradle,” and it is specifically his poetic vocation, along with his perception of “likenesses” and unity, that makes him vulnerable. “Patroling Barnegat” and “After the Sea-Ship,” the last poems in the group, together demonstrate his recovered assurance, by reaffirming the coexistence of natural and human power, and material and spiritual reality. The six poems between these two pairs trace the process of resolution and recovery by means of central recurring themes and images.

Very generally, the themes of Sea-Drift involve the speaker's confrontation with power and vastness, as manifested in nature and foreshadowed by death, as he attempts to reconcile individuality and cosmic mystery and thus to confirm individual identity and integrity. A secondary theme is the nature of vision, the faculty through which many of the tensions depicted in the sequence are resolved. These themes are worked out through images of land, sea, and shore; storm and calm; darkness and light; ships; and stars, and through an exploration of the Transcendentalist concepts of correspondence, unity, and transcendence.

The Sea-Drift poems move through a process rooted in the organic conception of existence held by Whitman and articulated most fully by Emerson, whose influence on Whitman I assume. The poems explore correspondence, unity, flux and transcendence, and their implications for the speaker's identity as an individual and a poet. Through his changing views of land, sea, and sky, he confronts the problems and doubts suggested by these concepts, and then gains assurance from the promise of transcendence and immortality he perceives in the signs of unity, likeness, and change that surround him.

The ideas of the unity and ceaseless flux of experience, of correspondence, and of transcendence and immortality imply another element essential to the organic point of view, and the resolution of Sea-Drift: the acceptance of mystery, and of human incapacity fully to understand miracles intuited or perceived. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman asserts,

The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality [that is, the non-material] must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents … a poetry worthy the immortal soul of man … will … have … a freeing, fluidizing, expanding, religious character … stimulating aspirations, and meditations on the unknown.⁷

Elsewhere, he speaks of “the soul's frequent joy in what cannot be defined to the intellectual part, or to calculation.”⁸

Vision, both physical and intuitive, is necessary to the perception of unity, process, and correspondence, to the imagination of transcendence and immortality, and thus, paradoxically, to the acceptance of mystery.⁹ The eye “integrates every mass of objects.”¹⁰ What one sees depends upon oneself, and so, Emerson asserts, we have the power of recreating ourselves and the universe through vision:

What we are, that only can we see. … Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.¹¹

Transcendence and correspondence are here inextricably linked. The correspondences one perceives depend upon one's own spirit; by transcending limited vision one can recreate the world and transform the correspondences between the self and the world. For Whitman, this fluidity of correspondence is liberating, for it means that one need not be tied to the present or to the material universe alone, that present similarities need not be permanent; it thus confirms the unity of the individual with the eternal spirit in fluid reality. This understanding of the liberating and fluid potential of correspondence is essential to the speaker's recovery from self-doubt, and reaffirmation of his transcendent power, in Sea-Drift.

As “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (LG [Leaves of Grass] 246) has been studied by numerous critics, I will here discuss only those aspects of the poem most germane to the Sea-Drift group as a whole. In this poem the boy, by sympathizing with the he-bird, recognizes and comes to terms with loss and death. He can do so, and thus move beyond grief, because of elements suggesting the possibility of immortality. First, there is the context of continuity: from the first line onward, the poem and the speaker's world are in motion, suggesting the parallel idea that spiritual and emotional life is also a continuous process of becoming, or transformation—and that loss is not absolute, as experience is not static. The truth of continuity is confirmed as the poem ends with the rocking of the cradle, an image missing from the 1871 ending but which reinforces the unity of the 1881 Sea-Drift. Continuity, of course, implies transcendence, which is also introduced early, in the narrator's “Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them.” (This line, like the boy's sympathetic intimacy with the bird, implies a double organic base for the poem, in transcendence and correspondence—the perception of both awakening the boy to his vocation.)

Not only continuity, but also unity, is suggested in the first twenty-two lines, as the speaker reveals that his “reminiscence” has evolved from myriad experiences and impressions,¹² fusing otherwise seemingly disparate pieces into one moving, melodious whole. This, too, suggests a spiritual parallel: all experience may be a unified whole, in which case death cannot truly separate the dead from the living, and life is part of a larger reality which includes all. Then there is the revelation at the end of the poem: the “strong and delicious” word, “death,” is the “clew” which unlocks the speaker's bardic vocation. Death itself is the source of poetry, for out of death come motion, process, and creativity. It is thus essential to life, too, and to the organic view of experience and art. Without death, the continuous process of life would be subverted into stasis; without recognizing death as part of cosmic process, the poet could not affirm his vision of a unified universe. And without acknowledging the grief of death, poetry could not be true to human experience.

While he reconciles himself to death, the outsetting bard makes other discoveries essential to Whitman's conception of poetry and truth. He discovers that being a poet is agonizing: he will always be restless and tormented, will always hear “the reverberations, / … the cries of unsatisfied love,” always feel “the fire, the sweet hell within.” And he discovers—implicit in the contrasts between the he-bird and himself—the necessity of free vision, unclouded by conventional expectations or narrowly defined goals. These two discoveries will be central both to the speaker's anguished self-doubt, and to his final reaffirmation, in the Sea-Drift sequence. The he-bird is doomed to disappointment because he can imagine only one possible comfort, one satisfactory result of his song—the return of his mate, whom he struggles unsuccessfully to see. It is because he would so narrow the possibilities for comfort that he feels alienated from nature. This is why his song is finally useless, why he can't hear “the word up from the waves.” The poet, imaginatively freer, can.¹³ (His tendency elsewhere to leave his poems to his readers and his readers to themselves indicates, too, Whitman's faith even in what he could not imagine.) Thus he is able not only to sympathize with the bird but to see death transformed and so to transcend grief.¹⁴

Out of the Cradle,” then, moves from separation to unity, from grief to re-vision, from perception of nature as alien and destructive to recognition of its organic wholeness and beauty, from limited vision to the daring imagination of a reality beyond (but not denying) the material, and from desire for the seeming security of understanding to acceptance of mystery.¹⁵ The succeeding Sea-Drift poems test the insights and discoveries of “Out of the Cradle,” and through a process of doubt, tentative hope, and assurance, move as a whole in the same directions and arrive at a similar visionary reaffirmation of the self and the organic universe.

Having become a poet in “Out of the Cradle,” the speaker is plunged into the pain of his vocation in “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life” (LG 253). Its first part echoes “Out of the Cradle” in structure—the first three lines similarly using repetition and parallel subordination—and in setting: “late in the autumn day” the narrator walks on the “rim” of the shore; “the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways.” There are important differences, however. The “old mother” no longer gives the clue. And his vocation makes the speaker not ultimately powerful, but terribly vulnerable. (In “Out of the Cradle,” vulnerability was finally a source of poetic perception and power; here it is not.) Now, as a poet, he is entangled “in the lines underfoot,” “Fascinated”; in his poet's search for “likenesses” and “types,” his eyes drop to the edge of the shore and, his vision confined to the immediate surroundings, he discovers a threatening world of correspondences. Changes from the Sea-Shore Memories to the Sea-Drift version confirm the speaker's despair. Deleting the first two lines of the 1871 “Elemental Drifts” keeps him from distancing himself as a commentator, and removing “me” and “my” from the 1871 “self of me” and “my poems” diminishes the self.

Section 2 describes this discovery and its effects. Here the speaker experiences the agonies which he knew only indirectly, in “Out of the Cradle”: self-doubt, dissatisfaction, the “unknown want.” The “shores I know” become unfamiliar “shores I know not,” and the sea becomes menacing: the breezes “set in upon me,” the ocean “rolls toward me closer and closer.” The natural world loses its unity and appears as mere broken fragments; correspondingly, the speaker sees himself as fragmented, “at the utmost … A few sands and dead leaves to gather.” He loses touch with “the real Me” which now, rather like the menacing ocean, mocks his poems, “Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.”¹⁶ Alliterative S's perversely transform the comforting “Hissing melodious” of “Out of the Cradle” into sibilant scorn. Failing to understand anything, and equating poetry with understanding, at the end of section 2 the speaker sees poetry as futile and himself as a victim of his own delusions. His desire to understand is comparable to the he-bird's desire to recover his mate in “Cradle”; like the bird's, the speaker's vision is severely limited. He is thus reduced to pleading for reassurance about his identity and his place in the universe.

In the first part of Section 3 (ll. 35-44), Whitman attempts to reestablish his connection to a unified world, and thus to recover his full identity: “We murmur alike. … What is yours is mine. …” But while struggling to reclaim wholeness, he again loses himself in fragmentation: “I too Paumanok … I too am but a trail of drift and debris.” In despair, accepting the grim correspondence he perceives “underfoot,” he pleads to “Paumanok,” the world he knows and loves, for the recognition which would restore his own full, unfragmented identity, begging for “the secret of the murmuring” of the oceans, the secret that presumably would restore wholeness and life-sustaining meaning to the fragmented universe. His pleas remind us of the he-bird's vain cries to his mate, and to the land, sea, and other elements, in “Out of the Cradle.” But Paumanok, “father,” does not answer. And despite the parenthetical hint of hope that “the flow will return,” neither does the “fierce old mother,” to whom the poet pleads in Section 4 “fear not, deny not me.” Instead of the sensuous, soft “laving” of the answering sea in “Out of the Cradle,” the speaker senses that the “old mother” is “hoarse and angry” as she rustles against his feet. While the speaker attempts to justify, or perhaps to apologize for himself (“I mean tenderly by you and all”), the sense of vulnerability and separation continues to dominate: “Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses.” He is small and ignorant before “this phantom looking down,” “You up there … Whoever you are,” whom he serves almost without volition (“we too lie in drifts at your feet”). While Allen identifies “you up there” as the reader, and James E. Miller says that the speaker is reassured by the certainty that there is “someone ‘up there,’”¹⁷ I find the references to the “phantom” far from reassuring; especially after the failure of “father” and “mother” to answer, this seems a desperate appeal. (And the tone is far different from that implied in a similar phrase, “Whoever you are holding me now in hand.”) He has been given no answer, no reassurance, no whole, powerful identity. The speaker remains a castaway, unanswered, cut off from union with nature and the fullness of his power.

Still, Section 4 contains at least hints of recovery. Besides the parenthetical reference to the returning flow of the tide, “the prismatic colors glistening and rolling” from “dead lips” might suggest the poetry made possible by and redemptive of anguish. But even so, the poet himself remains passive, unable to participate creatively: the “ooze exuding at last” does not depend on his efforts or perceptions. The repetitions of “Just as much for us … Just as much whence we come … we too” suggest, too, an as yet unsuccessful effort to reestablish a sense of unity, of belonging to the whole.

Underlying the despair of “As I Ebb'd” is the fact that seeing oneself as part of an encompassing All or Over-Soul, while essential, in the organic view, to full awareness and power, can also be fearful, as it may imply diminution and even loss of the self.¹⁸ The poet might overcome fear if he could envision the transcendence which, in the organic scheme, is made possible by correspondence and unity with the whole. However, his vision of correspondence still traps him in the fragmented world around him, instead of lifting him through “likenesses” to unity with the transcendent mystery above. The fourth section does suggest an effort to make these more self-sustaining connections and free himself from despair, but that he has not yet succeeded is evident in the next poem.

In “Tears” (LG 256), too, the speaker loses his identity in “likeness” or death, here imaged in the undifferentiated, engulfing, vision-obscuring storm. In setting and mood, “Tears” is comparable to Section 31 of the “Reminiscence,” in the 1859 “A Child's Reminiscence,” later “Out of the Cradle.” This passage remained in “Out of the Cradle” until Whitman completed Sea-Drift in 1881.

O give me some clue!
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
O a word! O what is my destination?
O I fear it is henceforth chaos!
O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and all shapes, spring as from graves around me!
O phantoms! You cover all the land and all the sea!
O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown upon me!
O vapor, a look, a word! O well-beloved!
O you dear women's and men's phantoms!(19)

The obscured vision, frantic uncertainty, and near-incoherence of the early poem convey sensations like those which overwhelm the speaker in “Tears”; this section was probably deleted from “Out of the Cradle” in 1881 in part to give “Tears” a more powerful effect, when both poems were included in Sea-Drift. In the final version of “Out of the Cradle,” lines 63-68 most clearly anticipate “Tears,” and they do so by contrast: the speaker, “blending [himself] with the shadows,” recalls “the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds … / The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing.” He is active, clearly identified within, but serenely distinct from, his surroundings.

“Tears,” which presents a nightmare version of correspondence and union with nature, embodies the deepest despair reached in “As I Ebb'd.” It is almost impossible to distinguish the storm from the speaker. In fact, personification suggests that the storm exists in, and gains much of its horror from, the turbulent despair in the speaker's mind.²⁰ A second effect of this merging is the loss of the speaker's identify: engulfed by the storm, he no longer knows himself apart from it. He sees himself as “a muffled head,” “that ghost,” a “shapeless lump”; he is “bent, crouch'd … on the sand,” as he was in “As I Ebb'd.” “Choked with wild cries,” he is no longer capable of transcending grief in poetry—his identity as poet, too, has collapsed. His estrangement from self is further indicated by questions: “who is that ghost? that form … ? / What shapeless lump … ?” He feels threatened from within and without by the “storm, embodied, rising, careering … desperate!” His identification with the natural world thus both disorients him and, as it did in “As I Ebb'd,” makes him vulnerable; alone in the dark, he is in danger of being “suck'd in by the sand,” consumed by the oozing mass of fragments which the world has become. The nightmarish quality of his experience is emphasized in lines 11-13:

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!

With the continuous rain of tears enveloping the poem, the storm, like a nightmare, seems endless.

“To the Man-of-War-Bird” (LG 257), the next poem in Sea-Drift, famous (but generally ignored) as Whitman's “paraphrase” from Jules Michelet,²¹ deserves consideration in its own right and as part of the sequence. Michelet clearly influenced the poem, but Whitman's poem differs significantly from Michelet's prose. Michelet detracts from the impression of the bird's strength by discussing its vulnerability; his bird, too, is only a navigator, while Whitman's is the ship. Whitman's poem has the power of greater concentration, of a consistent, rather than sporadic, address to the bird, and of a more intensely present speaker, all of which help make its reference to the soul more powerful than Michelet's. Even if Whitman's were a mere translation, its function in advancing the Sea-Drift process would be considerable.

This is the first of two poems in the group which suggest the possibility of transcending material fragmentation and dissolution. The speaker ecstatically discovers a being capable of escaping the storm, then suggests affinities between this being, the bird, and himself. The bird's powers of both repose and flight enabled it to sleep “all night upon the storm” which engulfed the poet in “Tears.” Now, no longer buffeted in the dark, but “emerging” to “The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun, / The limpid spread of air cerulean,” he looks up and recognizes in the bird hints of his own transcendent possibilities. Man and bird are linked by the words “speck,” “point,” and “floating.” They are also linked by the reference to the bird as “Thou ship of air,” a hint of the following poem's ship-soul metaphor. The serenity with which the speaker identifies himself as “a speck, a point,” in contrast to the anguish of self-diminution in “As I Ebb'd,” is another sign of progressive movement within the Sea-Drift group.

While the last two lines are ambiguous, they do suggest that the soul may surpass the bird's transcendence:

In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine!

In this poem, then, the speaker turns to new aspects of the natural world—the daytime sky and the bird. The bird is barely visible, but the speaker sees it and then imaginatively leaps beyond physical vision to perceive hints of his own power. He thus rediscovers correspondences to offset those of storm, night, disintegration, and drift which overwhelmed him in “As I Ebb'd” and “Tears.” This new likeness suggests the renewed possibility, first suggested in “Out of the Cradle,” that the speaker himself may transcend the limits of immediate, material experience. Not part of the Sea-Shore Memories group, this poem contributes an image of energy at a crucial point in the 1881 Sea-Drift. While the following poem, which was in the 1871 group, is thematically similar, by itself it lacks the conviction of sustaining power represented by the bird and essential to Whitman's hope of recovery from despair.

“Aboard at a Ship's Helm” (LG 258) continues the theme of transcendence. The ship's escape from the “wreck-place,” through human ingenuity and care, inspires wonder and joy. As in the previous poem, an escape narrative is followed by exclamations about the soul, and with them comes uncertainty mixed with hope that the soul, too, may escape shipwreck:

But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

The uncertainty comes from the fact that the exclamations raise a question: does the material ship's escape correspond to the soul's transcendence? There are strong suggestions that the soul does correspond to the ship, does have the capacity for transcending seeming destruction. The ship is explicitly made a metaphor for the soul, and the final words suggest the continuous process of growth and transcendence that Whitman attributed to souls fully attuned to the fluid reality of the universe.

The possibility of transcendence and immortality is confirmed in “On the Beach at Night” (LG 258), the central poem, and the one in which the emphasis of Sea-Drift shifts from doubt to affirmation. Unlike “As I Ebb'd,” this poem echoes “Out of the Cradle” with reassuring effects. Again, as in the earlier poems, it is an autumn night. The “ravening clouds … in black masses spreading,” lowering “sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,” suggest an oncoming storm like that which engulfed the speaker in “Tears.” As in “Out of the Cradle,” a child grieves over death, loss, and fragmentation. Again, too, the fear of death is provoked by threats from the natural world, the “burial clouds,” and the grim correspondences they imply.

But here, unlike what happens in “As I Ebb'd,” the father responds to the child's tears with kisses analogous to the caresses of the sea and air in “Out of the Cradle”; his comforting words echo the voice of the answering “old mother”:

With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection.

(Cf. “the sea … Whisper'd me … Lisp'd to me …,” the “hints” and “clew” of “Out of the Cradle,” and the “indirection” of the 1855 Preface.) By whispering “the low and delicious word death,” the sea in “Out of the Cradle” transformed death and affirmed the wholeness and continuity of life, and thus the possibility of transcendence. Now the father, telling his child of the planetary cycles, implies the soul's continuity and immortality, too. Affirming both correspondence and transcendence, father and poem confirm liberating visionary perception: the ravening clouds are victorious “only in apparition.” Like the poet described in the 1855 Preface, he can only hint; saying only “Something there is … Something that shall endure,” he affirms the essential mystery of the soul. Yet the final image gives reassuring concreteness, if not to “Something,” at least to its correspondent, “the radiant sisters the Pleiades,” thereby solidifying, too, the comfort and the sense of individual identity now derived from the natural world. This, too, reverses the effects of correspondence in “As I Ebb'd,” where natural disintegration implied personal fragmentation. Here, too, the father's gift of an “indirection,” a hint or clue, suggests the renewed possibility, with the affirmation of transcendence, of poetry. While in “As I Ebb'd” the poet looked around him and saw fragmentation, now, in “On the Beach at Night,” he looks at the stars and sees order, continuity, and unity.

The child's sex suggests that the poet, due probably to the possibilities hinted in “To the Man-of-War Bird” and “Aboard at a Ship's Helm,” has at the outset of the poem already begun to distance himself from the doubt and fear of “As I Ebb'd” and “Tears.” Sufficiently relieved of his fears to attribute them to a very different person, a little girl, he is able to acknowledge the natural “hints” that will assuage those fears, hear again the affirming voice of the sea, and comfort the child and himself.

The reassurance granted through confirmation of the soul's immortality in “On the Beach at Night” enables the speaker, in the two following poems, to see anew both the natural world and the cosmos. The vision of the natural world in “The World below the Brine” (LG 260) contrasts strikingly to that in “As I Ebb'd.” In the earlier poem, he contemplated the shore and the tidal debris; in the later one, he observes “the bottom of the sea.” Yet many elements in “The World below the Brine” are those of the earlier poem, simply seen anew through “the play of light.” Thus we have “A limp blossom or two” in the first poem, “strange flowers” in the latter one. This is typical of the transformations wrought in the later poem, where clearer vision transforms and reveals wholeness—not perceived, or perceived only as threatening, in the earlier one. We now see a world of color, of light, of life. Instead of drifted fragments, the poet sees “Forests at the bottom of the sea”; instead of a corpse floating helplessly among the bubbles on the surface, he sees “The sperm-whale at the surface, blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes.” The bubbles are now signs not of death but of life. The speaker does not deny the unlovely and dangerous elements of life, but he acknowledges “The leaden-eyed shark … Passions … wars, pursuits” without dread, seeing them clearly now in a context of wholeness and change:

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.

Affirming change, the poet again affirms continuity and the prospect of transcendence, as he did at the end of “Aboard at a Ship's Helm” and “On the Beach at Night.” He again recognizes that the natural world corresponds to human experience without limiting or determining it. Having envisioned transcendence and immortality in the previous poem, and thus no longer believing himself trapped in the material world, he can clearly see and appreciate its beauties. Vision has been the liberating faculty, as Emerson maintained, in Nature, it would be.

The new vision of “The World below the Brine” is complemented in the next poem, “On the Beach at Night Alone” (LG 260), by a new vision of the cosmos. Now the poet, having reestablished his own identity in the knowledge of his transcendent soul, can celebrate correspondence: “A vast similitude interlocks all.” He has recovered the “clef,” the “key” given in “Out of the Cradle.” The sense of cosmic unity is reinforced by parallelism encompassing “All spheres … All distances of place … All distances of time … All souls,” and by the envelope which encloses the parallel passage. The first part of the poem echoes both “As I Ebb'd” and “On the Beach at Night.” The poet is alone here; with his new vision he can sustain himself. Yet he is not alone; the “old mother,” the sea, that failed to answer in “As I Ebb'd,” now sings “her husky song,” affirming with him his connections to the rest of the universe. And the stars, symbols of the immortal soul in “On the Beach at Night,” shed their light. Most significantly, the “vast similitude” does not trap or entangle, as it did in “As I Ebb'd.” Rather, it accommodates the fluidity of continuous change affirmed in the several preceding poems. It is “the clef of the universes and of the future. … All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different … All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes” (emphasis added). And affirming change, the poem affirms the soul's transcendence, its ultimate “Passage to more than India.”

Roger Asselineau observes that Whitman preferred “an immanent God, mingled with the world, incarnated in each creature”; he quotes “On the Beach at Night Alone,” implying that the “vast similitude” is, or is analogous to, the immanent God.²² If this is correct (and, given that the unity of the over-soul is the basis of the organic concept of correspondence, it seems likely) the poem not only reaffirms that correspondence implies transcendence, but also restores a relationship between the speaker and the “phantom,” “You up there,” of “As I Ebb'd.”

Fortified by his new vision of the cosmos, the poet reaffirms his belief in immortality and his acceptance of the fullness of experience in three final poems, none of them in the 1871 Sea-Shore Memories. “Song for All Seas, All Ships” (LG 261) is song of “waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach.” That imaginative, or spiritual, as well as physical vision is implied, Section 2 of the poem confirms:

Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals!
But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of man one flag above all the rest,
A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death.

In contrast to their effects in “Aboard at a Ship's Helm,” shipwreck and death arouse no fear. Rather, they open the door to immortality for those “Pick'd” and “Suckled” by the sea, the “old husky nurse.” That the immortal “captains” and “brave sailors” embody the sea, and the song is “twined from all intrepid captains,” confirms the organic “similitude” announced in the previous poem. That the sea flaunts both visible and spiritual flags confirms correspondence and transcendence. Finally, by subtly shifting from a “few, very choice” immortals to “all nations … all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates … All seas, all ships,” poem and speaker mediate between the values of individual integrity and identity, and universal similitude, suggesting the individual value of each member of the whole.

Given the movement of Sea-Drift, from reconciliation and affirmation in “Out of the Cradle,” through doubt and despair, reassurance and hope, to reaffirmation in the poems just discussed, we might expect the poet to end the sequence by emphasizing transcendence and immortality. But Whitman's choice indicates the value he continued to place on the known world, and his ability, more steadily than Emerson, to keep his feet on the ground, even while affirming transcendence. Placing “Patroling Barnegat” and “After the Sea-Ship” last in the sequence allowed Whitman to end Sea-Drift in full awareness of the actual world, while hinting at humanity's transcendent possibilities.

Originally published six years apart, these poems here form a pair. In them, the poet affirms his acceptance of the fullness and unity of experience. Together, they conclude Sea-Drift with a certainty far more moving and convincing than the generalization of “On the Beach at Night Alone,” the final poem in 1871, could create.

In “Patroling Barnegat” (LG 262), Whitman acknowledges the savage, destructive, and incomprehensible face of nature. The absolute dominance of sea and storm is heightened by the poem's structure. The participles which end each line suggest constant swirling motion, an impression which is reinforced by the repetition of images: the “roar,” “slush and sand,” “milk-white combs,” and “savage trinity” of “Waves, air, midnight.” These repetitions create the sense that the elements are completely engulfing: in fact, while the last eight lines refer to the patrol, the people are never clearly seen or named; they cannot be distinguished from the midnight storm in which they appear as “dim, weird forms.” No kinship between humanity and nature is hinted at here, though; the sea is not a mother, and the fact that neither the speaker nor the patrol is identified with the storm is a mark of liberation. This poem could describe the same external scene evoked in “Tears.” Even the nearly verb-less swirl is like that of “Tears” (which lacks complete independent verbs in lines 1-5 and 8-13). The difference is the absence of anguish. Here, with no storm inside, the speaker can stand apart and describe the scene with equanimity.

In “After the Sea-Ship” (LG 263), conversely, Whitman celebrates the beauty of nature and, indirectly, human power. Again, present participles create the impression of constant motion. In daylight, though, the motion is light and joyous: “Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling … laughing and buoyant, with curves.” The sea is sensuous: “Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves.” But although the sea is most fully described, it is really the ship that dominates the poem from beginning to end, while the sea follows, playfully, beautifully, sensuously. It is “the great vessel sailing and tacking” that displaces the surface, creating the wake which follows it, as the visionary soul recreates and transcends material experience. As the ship was a metaphor for the soul, in “Aboard at a Ship's Helm,” and in “Song for All Seas, All Ships,” the ships' flags were tokens of the “spiritual woven signal” of immortality, so here, too, the ship represents both human inventive power and the power of the spirit; Whitman's ship and sea together make a subtle image of the way the flow of the organic universe follows the purposes and inspirations of the striving, yearning, individual soul. “Patroling Barnegat” and “After the Sea-Ship” confirm the belief that the contrasting faces of the natural world and apparently contradictory experiences balance each other as parts of a unified whole, and they confirm the soul's potential to transcend darkness and confusion and transform them into beauty, joy, and wholeness.

These final poems, then, confirm the meanings implied by the movement of the whole Sea-Drift sequence. The alternation of despair and affirmation enacted in the first six poems has given way, through the unequivocal assurance of “On the Beach at Night,” to new visions and affirmations. And the new understanding of correspondence, implying transcendence and immortality, in turn makes possible the untormented acceptance of the whirlwind in “Barnegat,” as well as the joyous vision of ship and sea in its companion poem. In effect, the sequence has attained a new rhythm: no longer trapped in oscillations between despair and hope, the poet acknowledges an harmonious continuity between the known and the unknown, the natural world and the mysteries to which it points. The awareness of this new rhythm or relationship transcends the limits of the older alternation of despair and hope even while it grows out of that tension. It is precisely this harmony between the known and the unknown that constitutes Whitman's vision and moves his poetry—whether it be the intimacy of soul and body in “Song of Myself,” the river flowing between present and future in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” or the soul's passage to “the seas of God,” inspired by the Atlantic cable. The resolution of doubt and the new visions in Sea-Drift, then, implicitly promise the renewal and continuation of poetic vocation which was the gift of “Out of the Cradle” and the source of anguish in “As I Ebb'd.” And the whole sequence, its resolution achieved through the ordering of its tensions and its reverberating imagery, confirms Whitman's care in organizing and shaping the clusters of his Leaves.

Notes

1. Robert LaRue discusses the “indefiniteness” of the sea symbolism in six Sea-Drift poems, without considering the relationships among these and the other poems, or the arrangement of the whole group; see “Whitman's Sea: Large Enough for Moby Dick,” Walt Whitman Review, 12 (1966), 51-59.

2. Miller, A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 214-215.

   Crawley, The Structure of Leaves of Grass (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 139-143.

   Frederick Schyberg remarks that Whitman examines the meaning of existence on the beach of Long Island; see Walt Whitman, trans. Evie A. Allen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 340-341. Richard P. Adams states that, especially in “Out of the Cradle,” the individual's development is completed by his realization of the meaning of death; see “Whitman: A Brief Revaluation,” Tulane Studies in English, 5 (1955), 128. Richard V. Chase maintains that in Sea-Drift the poet has come to doubt the possibility of personality; see “‘Out of the Cradle’ as a Romance,” in The Presence of Walt Whitman, Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 71.

3. The Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago: Packard, 1946), 215.

4. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 496-497.

5. Passage to India (New York: 1870; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1969). Passage to India was bound in to some copies of the 1871 edition, and annexed to the 1872 imprint, of Leaves of Grass, but the Sea-Shore Memories cluster was not revised until it became the core of Sea-Drift in 1881. See Leaves of Grass, A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Bradley, Blodgett, Golden, and White (New York: New York University Press, 1980), I, xviii.

6. Unless otherwise noted, texts of the poems are quoted from Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973). Page numbers in this text (LG) will be indicated for each poem.

7. Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), II, 417, 419.

8. Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1963), I, 292. (Specimen Days).

9. Vision is more central to Emerson, who generally elevates it above the other senses, than to Whitman, who celebrates all his senses. Still, its great importance is indisputable; it is Whitman, “afoot with [his] vision,” who affirms that the poet, as he sees farthest, has the most faith.

10. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), I, 12. (Nature).

11. Collected Works, I, 45. (Nature).

    Democratic Vistas is moved by the same impulse that propels the final paragraph of Nature: the redemptive literature Whitman demands will be similarly visionary and re-creative.

12. Richard P. Adams observes that the poet's illumination has been a long process (“Whitman: A Brief Revaluation,” 139).

13. As Paul Fussell puts it, the boy can “entertain transcendental paradoxes” and make metaphors; he is able to see reality as process. See “Whitman's Curious Warble: Reminiscence and Reconciliation,” in The Presence of Walt Whitman, 43-47.

14. Stephen E. Whicher concludes that “Out of the Cradle” is essentially a tragic poem which accepts the inevitability of death without clinging to any hope of immortality. He suggests that Whitman may have dropped what had been Section 31 of the original “reminiscence,” a passage filled with anxiety and uncertainty (see p. 56 of this essay), to mask doubts which the aging poet no longer wished to admit, and that the true purport of the poem was thereby falsified. See “Whitman's Awakening to Death,” in The Presence of Walt Whitman, 1-27. I believe, though, that “Out of the Cradle” should be considered as part of the Sea-Drift group, which as a whole affirms immortality, and that the deletion of Section 31 makes sense in the context of the sequence; without this frenzied passage in “Out of the Cradle,” similar passages in “As I Ebb'd” and “Tears” stand in sharper relief.

15. I disagree with Stephen A. Black's contention that in “Out of the Cradle” Whitman limits, rather than enlarges, his consciousness. See Whitman's Journeys into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 66. Most critics have agreed that the poem achieves an expansion of awareness, though they frequently differ on the objects of that awareness.

16. Discussing the 1860 version of “As I Ebb'd,” both Black and Whicher maintain that “the eternal self of me that threatens to get the better of me, and stifle me” and “the real ME” are fundamentally opposed. (Black, Whitman's Journeys into Chaos, 56; Whicher, “Whitman's Awakening to Death,” 13-14). I am inclined to assume that they are not. The fact that out of pride in his self he has composed poems need not prevent that same self (whose “real” essence he has failed to capture) from mocking him. Whitman's assertion in Section 9 of “I Sing the Body Electric” (and elsewhere) that the body is the soul also supports the argument against a sharp division here between body and spirit.

17. Allen, The Solitary Singer, 247-249; Miller, A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass, 214-215.

18. The feared loss of identity as the speaker is overwhelmed by some larger entity has been discussed from a variety of viewpoints. See, for example, Howard J. Waskow, Whitman: Explorations in Form, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 43-44; Edwin H. Miller, Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey, 15-16; Lawrence Kramer, “Ocean and Vision: Imaginative Dilemmas in Wordsworth, Whitman and Stevens,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 79 (1980), 210-230; and Crawley, The Structure of Leaves of Grass, 141.

19. “A Child's Reminiscence,” ed. Thomas O. Mabbott and Rollo G. Silver, rpt. in University of Washington Quartos, 1 (1930), 17. This section (31) remained in the poem until 1881. All that remain in the 1892 version of “Out of the Cradle” are the first two lines: line 159 and part of line 158 of the 1892 version.

20. Black's remark that “As I Ebb'd” involves a recognition that nature is not only external but a force within the self (Whitman's Journeys into Chaos, 58-60) is certainly applicable to “Tears,” too.

21. Although he was not the first to notice the similarities between “The Frigate Bird” (in Michelet's The Bird, London and New York, 1869) and Whitman's poem, Allen's article, “Walt Whitman and Jules Michelet,” Etudes Anglaises 1 (May 1937), 230-237, is the most frequently cited comment on this issue. Other critics have apparently accepted his conclusion that Whitman's “whole poem is merely a paraphrase of a passage” from Michelet's book.

22. The Evolution of Walt Whitman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), II, 36-37.