“The novel is of Franklin Evans who is the country mouse who comes to ruin in the wicked city. Led astray by evil companions, he takes one swig of wine in a tavern and sets himself on the downward path. As wine bibbing leads to harder stuff, the hapless Evans becomes a puppet of the demon rum. His forays into low dives and dance halls cost him his job, wreck his marriage, contribute to his saintly wife’s death, and quickly bring him to a life of petty crime.
Evans is a maddening protagonist, utterly lacking in will or initiative; he’s a sort of moral polyp afloat in a bottle. Even so, the course of his downfall isn’t completely predictable. As if to show how low drink can bring a man, Whitman has Evans move to Virginia where he falls in love with Margaret, a “creole” slave whom he marries but comes to hate. In her “swarthiness,” Margaret embodies sheer animal appetite; she personifies Evans’s own thirst for drink. Interestingly, she’s the only character who pulses with a semblance of life. Maddened by jealousy, “the wretched Creole” poisons the genteel Mrs. Conway, a luscious widow whom Evans wants to take as his mistress. These are the ugliest chapters in the novel, made more distasteful by Whitman’s shameless attempts to play on race for sensational effect. But this is, of course, a tale of redemption. Evans takes the temperance pledge. He ends up inheriting a fortune from a benefactor. Whitman’s moral is clear: Sobriety isn’t just virtuous, it can be lucrative too”. http://www.nysun.com/arts/dominion-of-the-liquor-fiend/61491/retrieved on 12-08-09

The stanza I chose has ran with me through-out this class, from the first time I read this stanza and I fell in love with it. I did most of my projects surrounding it as well as this. I did two videos in different rooms reading the same part of the poem. The reason I chose this location to read my poem is that I felt very alive and happy at this location. It reminded me of little scenes which I saw while reading Franklin Evans. The part with me in the bathroom I felt signifies me celebrating who I am and how times have changed. Whitman always spoke of “ I Am, You” which brought the reader closer to him, but after reading some of his work and biography, I felt as though in some ways he was not being true to himself and who he was. Franklin Evans seemed to be a part of him that he never spoke about, a part that never came out (unconscious part). Being in a stall was liberating, I felt a little like Franklin Evans experiencing alcohol. Just in a better way. The second scene was in a velvet dining room while having dinner and drinks, it reminded me of a reading we did of Charles Dickens when he came to NYC and spoke of it in terrible ways. The remembrance was of the ladies in their bright clothing, the red velvet room felt like that, it was like an evil room of uncertainties. Just like Franklin’s experiences in the city.
My video may be a little different due to the location, but this is where I found Whitman.

Where Nicole found Whitman! In a stall while having dinner.

nicole | MySpace Video

I have heard what the talkers were talking….the talk of the

beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

“Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are million of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eye either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”

While reading this part of the poem, I felt like he was talking to me directly. Since day one of my life, I cannot remember when I’ve followed a direct order(another reason why I’m not in the military). I’ve always question things, The Bible, The Holy Qur’an, my parents, and my teachers.  I’ve always made my own decisions.

I’m a Muslim. And I have a very close friend who is a Christian. The different between me and him is not only our religion, we look at life differently. Though my religion wants me to “believe” without quetioning, I still felt like there are some questions that needed to be answered.  For instance, Why do I need a religion if I strongly believe in God?

Going back to what Withman was saying, that we should “filter them from ourselves” is exactly what I’ve been doing since I know myself.

“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of other, ever regardful of others,.

Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine…

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,

A novice beginning yet experiment of myriads of seasons,

Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion.

A farmer, mechanic, artist gentleman, sailor, quaker,

Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. “

My voice goes after what  my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds. Speech is the twin of my vision….it is unequal to measure itself. It provokes me for ever, It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough….why don’t you let it out then? Come now I will not be tantilized….you conceive too much of articulation. 

Speech is a very powerful tool. When used it can provoke change, good and bad. That choice is not only up to the speaker though. It’s also up to the listener. We tend to hear what we want to hear and not always what is being said.

Else it were time lost listening to me.

Walt Whitman has referred to men and women interchangeably in the poem, Leaves of Grass, so it seemed natural to assume that when he said, “What is man anyhow?” that he was also referring to women as well. He followed this simple question with another, “What am I?”, as if you should want to know, and proceeded to question us, the readers, in lowercase letters, “what are you?”, not because he wanted to know us, his readers. He wants us to question ourselves and answer in our own words, otherwise, his words would have no meaning if they don’t invoke you, me, we to find out about us. About who we are as individuals and as people.

. . .

Sit awhile wayfarer,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes I will certainly kiss you with my goodbye kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life

Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

. . .

If I and you and the worlds and all beneath or upon their surfaces,

and all the palpable life, were this moment reduced back to

 a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run,

We should surely bring up again where we now stand,

And as surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther

                                                                                                                        ——Whitman

             I choose these lines because “life” is no stopPage, and never can be stoppage.  Time is keep running and there are a lot of things waiting for me to do.  I’m sure that I have the ability to go farther and much farther than now in the futher.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

These lines stood out to me the most. When Whitman refers to the pleasures of heaven and the pains of hell, I assume he is refering to the good and bad in life such as many obstacles we may face.  Then he talks about how woman are equal to men.

Come my biys and girls, and my women and household and intimates.

Now the performer launches his nerve….he has passed his prelude on the reeds within.

Easily written losefingered chords! I feel the thrum of their climax close.

My head evolves on my neck,

Music rolls, but not from the organ….folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.

These lines meant the most to me because they were the only ones I could find that related to instrumental music. Being a former band dork, I felt somewhat obligated to pick them. ^-^’

[50]

          In these lines, I found that Whitman redefines the greatness of sea and relates it to his feelings by taking a side by the sea.In other words, act of sea resembles his deep feelings like his anger, his calmness and how they change. Also, he  sees the sea as graves that many people  drawn in the past without being burried which he recalls unshovelled graves. In the picture, I am in a marine and looking at ocean and thinking , hence I do find myself  relevant to these lines. I always loved to watch the ocean when it was calm, in the other side I was afraid of it when the scary waves hit the shore. In my opinion, Whitman is saying; sea is like human being when we think of our feelings that sometimes being angry, sometimes being happy and calm and how huge it is that just like a human being how great amount of feeligns and information we can store in ourselves and some of the pains, difficult times we experience we just forget them by the time just like sea burries lives of people.

song of oktay