Filmed in Marye’s Heights at the Fredericksburg Battlefield. My camera makes me sound like I have a lisp, I don’t know why.

*Title stolen  from inspired by Dr. Scanlon

My Womanly Whitman

You say you speak for the masses,

that your words bodies for our bright souls

but my body is crude at your hands, unskilled

in curves and perfection.

You say you contain multitudes, but you can barely envision me.

You did not know, but I have contained multitudes as well.

I was there in your masculine rough hewn hills, rolling

mountain lines, painted into red sand deserts and sculpted

into warm stucco walls, in damp depths of canyons

that descend beyond the limit of your thoughts.

And yet, I have seen you only in broken mausoleums,

carved in granite and steel, rotted in petrified logs

invaded by time.

You think you have built this America without

me, and invited me back to admire your craftsmanship

and sew its garments, but I am not a visitor,

or a servant, or a nurse who longs to be buried with her soldiers.

I am not born out of your cracked skull, made whole only

when you exalt the beauty of my sons.

You, who do not believe in the god stuff, should have known

that I came before you.

But you, slouching, cocked brim, good grey wise uncle Walt,

I can’t revere you, I

can’t believe you, you

who have never known me under your fingers in the night, you

who have only known me through idle conversations

with your married projected lovers.

One of the things that I find fascinating about Whitman is that, while I’m not very much of a patriot, I can jump on his America-loving train. He writes beautiful sweeping visions of the nation, and he includes me in them (well as a woman that’s somewhat arguable, but I’ll avoid that line of thought this time), and it feels ominous and powerful. Normally I’m all about some “the American dream is dead!” poems/songs/books what have you, and yet somehow Whitman can get me away from that, if only for a short while. However, when I read Whitman’s work, I don’t envision it applying to America now. I apply it to some idyllic America of long ago, one that does not, and will never exist again.

Obviously it’s not just me who has this preference for the depressing view of America, since so many people write about it. It got me thinking though, did society really change that much from Whitman’s time to now that we’re so much keener to bash our country than talk about how great it is? What happened that created such a giant shift? It can’t be that things are so much more corrupt now than back then, or harder or more horrible. In Whitman’s time they were dealing with tenement houses and awful working conditions, racism, bad pay, unemployment, the same things that Bruce Springsteen and others write about. Yet something tells me that if Ginsberg or Springsteen went back in time, their take on America wouldn’t resonate the same way that Whitman’s did, and vice versa.

Basically every idea I formulate as a reason for this shift has an equally valid opposition. I wondered if it was because there still seemed to be so much opportunity left in America during Whitman’s time. There were parts of it that were still unexplored, that hadn’t been carved up into states yet. Maybe the “American dream” is something that people still widely believed in. Then I am reminded of Dr. Rigsby’s course on American Realism, and I’m pretty confident that the people of Whitman’s time were aware that the “American dream” was something only available to those who were lucky, or were already privileged.  Even now, while many people recognize that the ideal of the American dream is just that, there are still people who come to this country because of the belief that you can do anything here.

Another thing that I have considered is that perhaps people during Whitman’s time people needed an uplifting view of America, especially when it got to the Civil War. Things were bad for pretty much everyone at that time, and to be included in Whitman’s ideal vision of America was what they needed. Maybe we can only enjoy Springsteen and Ginsberg because we come from a position of privilege. Most of us will never have to go to war, or work in a factory for minimum wage, but we can look at it from a distance and get mad about the injustice of it all. We can criticize the government without being in danger of being imprisoned or persecuted or shunned for it. On the flip side of that though, that doesn’t include the people who aren’t privileged, who Springsteen centers his narratives around, and who still enjoy his music.  

So in the end, I have no concrete ideas about why this shift has occurred. Why can I accept Whitman’s view of the America in the past when I know it’s not really true? Why does “Song of Myself” make me just as happy as Ginsberg’s “America” or Springsteen’s “No Surrender?” I don’t know. I put it to the rest of the world to sort these things out for me.

In reading the 1855 version, I had no real preconception of Whitman, no real knowledge of who he was, and what little I did know of him had no bearing on what I thought of the poem, or how I interpreted it.  I read Song of Myself viewing the speaker as an anonymous being; since I had no real idea of Whitman, I only placed him as a name in the narration. In reading the deathbed edition however, it’s just the opposite. I have a very definite idea of who Whitman is, and I can’t help but let my feelings and thought about Whitman influence how I see the speaker. So it’s hard to say how much of the changes I noted were actually changes, or me just viewing things differently.

 I noticed that even though many of the powerful lines are the same, I read them in a completely different way in the DB edition. I often would read a line, and then double check the 1855 edition just to see if it had been changed at all. I was somewhat surprised that the lines and images jumping out at me were often the same in the 1855 as in the DB edition. It was interesting to me though, that many of the lines and verses I underlined or took special notice of in the DB edition were completely different from ones I had taken note of in my reading of the 1855 version. Knowing all the things I do now about Whitman’s life, different things stuck out to me.

“I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.” (239)

This line appears in both the 1855 version and 1891 version. At first when I read this line in the 1891 version, I thought perhaps he had added it in, and then found out the same line, unchanged, was in the 1855 version. I couldn’t believe how differently I interpreted it. In the 1855 version I see a young Walt, a little bit pompous, exalting himself, his poetic career in front of him. In the 1891 version, I see the older Whitman, looking back on his career, greeting the future of America, himself, poetry, anything. I want to know if Whitman reread these lines and thought of his younger self, or if he, like me, saw that he had changed, and yet the line still meant the same thing really. Maybe this is why Song of Myself still speaks to me, over 150 years after it was published. Because it could still speak to, speak of, Whitman, even 40 years after he had written it originally. It occurred to me around this point that not only was I projecting my knowledge of Whitman onto this reading, but also the knowledge that he was near his death. That line definitely stuck out for that reason.

As far as the actual changes I saw in the poem, most of them seemed to give the speaker more confidence. Whitman eliminated the ellipses (something which I saw changed in other poems) and some of the commas as well. He also compacted the stanzas and lines from the earlier edition. There were less lines just free floating. At times in the 1855 version, while the speaker was very sure of himself, it seemed that often there were time when the speaker was testing the waters; it didn’t seem like he was always completely behind the ideas being thrown out. This speaker is confident and wise in everything he says. There are no drawn out pauses of consideration, just a straight forward laying out of what he is trying to say to his audience.

There also seem to be less references to God, possibly in relation to this confidence. Instead of in the 1855 edition where Whitman says

“Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?” (45)

In the DB edition he asks

“Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?” (206)

This more direct tone seems to be in connection with the more knowledgeable and wise speaker of this edition.

There were other small changes that influenced by interpretation of the speaker. On 214, the line

“I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.”

felt very powerful to me. I immediately looked it up in the 1855 edition, to see that the last half of the second line “—this suits me” (54) had been added on. I could very much see the speaker I had been envisioning—the aged, wise Whitman—saying this line. Maybe it just seems like something an old man would say, I don’t know. To me it seemed like something Whitman would say, from what I know of him anyway. It gives me this very relaxed, accepting sense of the speaker, falling in line with what I have been thinking of Whitman.

Even reading the last section of the poem, about looking for Whitman under our boot soles, etc., gave me a completely different feeling. I knew they were the same lines that I had read from the beginning of the semester, but it didn’t change the fact that I felt them so strongly this time around. Not to say they weren’t strong from the beginning, because they were, but imagining the good grey poet instead of the young, well, also grey poet made me a bit emotional. It was then that I finally concluded that I would never know for certain how much the speaker had actually changed.

            I don’t really know how to end this, other than to say that this is probably an awful mess that doesn’t make much sense. I tried. Perhaps I will post more on this later, since I am already at a very substantial amount of words. There were a lot of other small changes I wanted to talk about. So in conclusion, I need a follow-up post.

Last night I started poking around on databases for ideas on what I should do my final project on, and I happened to stumble on an article called “Whitman, Springsteen, and the American Working Class” by Greg Smith. I had to read this for two reasons. The first being that my mother is a HUGE Bruce Springsteen fan, and has spent the last two years converting me so that I will accompany her to shows on his cur

rent tour with the E Street band (we’ve been twice in the last year, and we’re going again in November) and the second reason being that it’s a pretty interesting comparison, considering Bruce Springsteen is kind of like the Walt Whitman of our (our parent’s?) time in the sense that America is his schtick.

Older picture of the Boss circa the late 70's early 80's. Did I mention I totally have the hots for him?

A young photo of Whitman for good measure.

The article discusses the success of the respective writers to reach/capture the American working class, something  Whitman, as we all know, desperately wanted to do. Smith says that Springsteen wins this fight on both counts, and I have to agree. While the article mostly focused on Springsteen, it did bring up an interesting contrast between Walt and Bruce. Whitman represents the idealized American Dream, where America is continuing to expand, the industrial revolution is still in motion, and the working man is happy and robust (Smith refers to “I Hear America Singing”). Springsteen is concerned with destroying the fallacy of the American Dream, and truthfully portraying the American working class, destroyed by their blue collar jobs. Smith makes no mention of Whitman’s war poetry (I suppose that would be a bit of a tangent considering it was focused on the working class) but I wondered what comparisons he would have drawn between Springsteen and Whitman there.  While he may have romanticized the working man, Whitman was of course dedicated to portraying the horror of war,  just like Springsteen sings about the effects of the Vietnam war. 

You can read the article here.

By the end of the article I was prepared to start working on in-depth comparison of Whitman and Springsteen, but I’m not sure there would be any real value to that analysis except that it would amuse me…

In class we’ve often made fun of Whitman for being so much of a creeper about Lincoln in his writings. It occurred to me though that one of the possible reasons it seems like that is because Whitman is addressing one particular person through his writing in these instances. Whitman usually refers to an ambiguous “you,” which is often plural. We don’t know Whitman’s true relationship to the “you” in his writing. So then when reading Whitman’s poetry about Lincoln or his writings about Lincoln, it comes off seeming a little weird, because we know that Whitman never met Lincoln, and only saw him a few times, and yet refers to “him I love.”

Even still though, his love for Lincoln that he expresses through his poetry is definitely different from the Calamus love and love for the soldiers he writes about. He seems to acknowledge that he has never been in close contact with Lincoln by leaving out physicality from these writings, or perhaps signals to the fact that this kind of love is different, a reverent love. I was poking around on the internet to see if there was any symbolism for the lilac, and according to several sources, lilacs usually represent early love or first love. Often “first love” gets romanticized and idealized, and putting that alongside his relationship to Lincoln, it seems like he’s trying to portray a pure love for this man that he didn’t know, leaving out sexuality and physicality.

I loved where Whitman wrote about gathering armfuls upon armfuls of lilacs and bringing them to the coffin, it was so touching and romantic in a strange way. Especially after seeing some of the pictures of Whitman yesterday and just the general experience, I could perfectly see him with his arms full of flowers and his beard, laying them down for Lincoln. I don’t really know what to say other than it made me kind of love him for it.

This one isn’t of the battlfield, but the man on the left was a confederate soldier who went out on the battlfield and gave water to wounded union soldiers. I want t say he was called the angel of Fredericksburg, but I’m not sure that was his name. The picture on the right is a monument to him.

The picture on the left is of the battlefield wall with the Innis house in the distance. The right hand picture is of the same wall with the Innis house.

This photo is of the Steven house, which you can see the foundation of on the right.

Picture of what the battlefield originally looked like, and a picture of what’s there today.

You can see the images at a larger size if you go to my flickr account, I think if you go here you should be able to see them. Hopefully I’ll be adding more picture from the trip within the next two days.

Background:

Surgical saws and tools have been in use since at least 3000 B.C. The first known surgical armamentaria, the equivalent of a Civil War surgeon’s kit, was found in Pompeii, and dates back to 79 A.D. (Kirkup 21). Surgeon’s tools at the time were composed from many materials, including copper, bronze, silver and steel (29). It was typical for surgeons to choose their own material for their tools, as well as help craft them, so there was a lot of variation from country to country. In the 15^th century, tools became slightly more standardized, and the first widely used saw was the bow saw. This instrument was often highly ornamental, and was often extremely long, with some models reaching up to 67 cm. Surgeons were advised to keep an extra blade handy when performing surgery, as the blades would often snap during the procedure, due to their length and lack of reinforcement. Though the ornamental saws were quickly done away with, as the decorations often tore the tissue around the amputation site, the lengthy bow saws remained the popular choice for the next two centuries (387).

Surgical Saw Development Leading up to the Civil War:

The 18^th century saw the rise of smaller saws with better adapted features. In fact, many of the saws that were used in the Civil War are very similar to those used today. The biggest difference between past and current saws is that while current saws are made from stainless steel, saws from the Civil War era were nickel based (Belferman 1). While the exact number of amputations during the Civil War is unknown, it is estimated to be around 70,000 total and accounted for 75% of all major surgeries performed (Trammell 46). Amputation was the standard treatment for any wound that created a compound fracture. Remarkably, around 75% survived the operations. This is most likely due to several advances made in surgical saws and tools just prior to the Civil War. In his book American Surgical Instruments, James Edmonson states that craftsmanship of surgeon tools in the 19^th century was greatly improved and expanded due to new manufacturers, as well as an influx of immigrants who brought their own particular skills and knowledge from their native countries, and the older more established companies mixing together (44). Many advances and changes were also made during the Crimean War by British surgeons. Several major changes included the invention of a frame saw with an adjustable rotating blade in 1850 by the Butcher Company (Kirkup 202). The rotating blade gave surgeons the ability to be more precise in their incisions, as well as allowed them to cut out damaged tissue in such a way that sometimes did away with the need to amputate.  A second major change to the saw was the rise in popularity of the pistol handle. 

 The handle was much easier to grip than the previous t-shaped handles usually featured on saws. Another major shift in saws had to do with the introduction of tenon saws. Tenon saws were smaller, and more accurate than the bow saw, which was still in heavy use. The saws were much less cumbersome, and were reinforced along the back. This allowed for more movement of the blade, as the blade could often pivot on the reinforcement, which helped the surgeon avoid damaging the soft tissue around an amputation site. The reinforcements also did away with the problem of blade breakage, which was the biggest downfall of the bow saw. Tenon saws became the most commonly used in Britain, and were widespread in the U.S. as well, though they were not nearly as popular in continental Europe (203).

Use in the Field

Surgeons were always equipped with a surgeon’s kit, a case that contained around 30 different tools (Trammell 51). The U.S. government purchased large numbers of specially manufactured kits from instrument makers at the time to distribute to field surgeons (Edmondson 50). Several main manufacturers of surgeon kits at this time were Jacob H. Gemrig, Horatio G. Kern, George P. and Henry C. Snowden and Dietrich W. Kolbe (43). These kits were usually made from mahogany and lined with velvet. As many Civil War doctors would later note, this was not particularly conducive to maintaining sanitation, as the tools would often go back into the kits after being hastily wiped off. Most kits consisted of two saws, the capital and metacarpal saw, along with many other forms of amputation knives, scalpels and other tools. These saws would be the capital saw and the metacarpal saw.

The capital saw was used for large bones, whereas the metacarpal saw was used for smaller bones. An amputation could not be made with only these tools alone though. A surgeon’s kit was supplemented with various amputation knives and scalpels, as well as a tourniquet and forceps (Trammell 51).

Works Cited

Edmonson, James M. American Surgical Instruments. San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1997.

Trammell, Jack “‘Life Is Better Than Limb’.” America‘s Civil War 21.6 (2009): 46-51. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 20 Oct. 2009.

Kirkup, John. The Evolution of Surgical Instruments. CA: Norman Publishing, 2003.

Belferman, Mary. “On Surgery’s Cutting Edge in the Civil War.” Washington Post 13 June 1996.

In spite of all this, I found myself feeling a lot of admiration for what Whitman did for those soldiers. Referring to the prompt for this week, he really did treat those soldiers the way that Whitman as speaker tells his audience how he wishes to treat them. He is tender, and while outwardly trying to be non-sexual, it’s evident in his writings and Morris’ description that he struggled with his feelings while with the soldier, and formed more than casual relationships with some. He holds them, caresses them, tries to make them feel better, much like Whitman the speaker does for his readers through his poetry. According to Whitman, the soldiers responded positively to him, in the same way I’m sure Whitman wanted his readers to react. While Morris notes that “you are always the hero of your own biography” it seems very plausible to me that Whitman would be well accepted among the soldiers. I mean, who wouldn’t want someone to visit them and bring them gifts when they were trapped somewhere as foul as those hospitals, being taken care of by soldiers who weren’t good enough to go off to battle?

So often I feel that I am looking at a juxtaposition of two very different sides of Whitman, and the two opposing sides are making my decision on how I view him incredibly difficult. Part of me wants to, and does, accept him as the great American poet, someone who’s poetry is beautiful and inspiring, and yet I can’t reconcile that to my frustration at his all-knowing stance in his poetry, in which his personal view points are not always what I want them to be.

This flag was flown during the battle of Fredericksburg, as well as some other big name battles. The lighting isn't great, but you should be able to make out "Fredericksburg" embroidered on the bottom.

This is a list of places where the flag was flown.

This flag was flown at the Spotsylvania Court House battle.

And also just for fun:

This is made entirely out of locks of human hair from a bunch of different people, including...

See where the 1 is? That would mark off Jefferson Davis' hair. Awesome.

Apparently this was an art form back in the day…strange.

My pictures/blog  from our field trip should be up soon, Flickr wasn’t letting me upload anything for a while.

Meg and I have noticed that most people writing civil war poetry were not writing from a position of experience, but most likely from their lazy boys by the fire. A lot of their poetry had to do with glorifying the war cause and trying to inspire people to go to battle. The most prominent writers were never involved in the war.

When I was reading “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” it seemed like a pretty direct criticism of those people. The pennant, calling the child to war and yet having nothing to do with the war in and of itself is saddening in a way. Especially with the father, trying desperately to make the child understand that the war isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is a sad contrast.  Hardly any writers at the time seemed to be pointing out the utter pointlessness and brutality of the fighting going on, but Whitman went ahead and put it out there. “The Wound Dresser” is also a very direct attempt to portray the violence of the war. It’s almost like he’s using shock value to get his point across.

I also thought it was interesting how in several poems Whitman inserts direct speakers, something I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps this is an attempt to legitimize the points he’s attempting to make?

I definitely have a new respect for what Whitman was doing during this time period. Also, I would like to say that his poetry is LOADS better than a lot of other civil war writings we’ve come across. The awful rhyming…just awful. Also sometimes sickeningly patriotic, especially when considering how all these young boys were dying and people thought it was all for the glory of the union…just…ugh. So kudos to Whitman for stepping away from his grand vision of America to point out that this killing is senseless, yo.

I think some of the problems with Whitman’s description of his war experiences are the same problems that we run into with his poetry. He tries to represent everything and everyone, and therefore somewhat loses something when he begins to generalize and list. I saw this in the way he kept his diary like a catalogue, a description we have used for his poetry, a catalogue of the various soldiers he met, their injuries, what he gave them, whether or not they died.  On the one hand we are seeing the mass amount of destruction caused by this war- it seems like every soldier Whitman described had something amputated- but on the other hand we’re still not seeing any reflection on how this is going to affect the soldier’s life from then on, or his family.

I thought Whitman’s most interesting observations were not necessarily with the soldiers, but when he observed life outside of the hospitals. I loved the passage where he described the inauguration ball taking place in the patent office, where months before he had seen the cots of the soldiers.

So to answer the question for this week, I’m not really sure whether or not Whitman succeeded in getting the “real” war into his books. At his time, I feel like it’s very likely that all of the horrible injuries and mass casualties were not necessarily widely reported, so maybe for Whitman’s time he really was giving a more real account of the civil war than anyone else was at the time. The passage about the two brothers who were fighting on opposite sides and were injured in the same battle, the wounds from which both subsequently dies, strikes me that way. Perhaps no one in Whitman’s time would have made a statement like that. I feel like now though, especially the way the civil war is gone over and over again in history classes throughout grade school, most people are very aware that family members often fought against each other, that the battles were extremely bloody, and the politics involved in the fighting. I wonder if Whitman would say that the history books now are giving a more true account of things.

Ok this is a side note but, every time Whitman mentioned the “naked” bodies of the soldiers and then that part where he said he was sitting by the side of the soldier while he was sleeping, I just got this really weird image of him being a creeper and watching people while they slept…not to mention the part where he alludes to stalking Lincoln…

For instance, in A Word Out of the Sea, all the commas gave it this amazing rhythm. I was reading it out loud to myself, and getting really into it (thank goodness my roommate was not around). The rhythm fit really well with the idea of the waves going back and forth and the circular motion he was trying to show through the poem. Then I read Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and it wasn’t drastically different, but he removed around half, maybe more, of all the commas. Like I said before, it seems like mostly he was just making the poem neater. One of the things I really love about Whitman is the way everything is so stream of consciousness, like he’s incorporating every idea that he’s having at every second into the poem. I love the rawness of his writing. Maybe I am making too much out of it, but I feel like he took that away along with the commas.

Another change I found interesting in this poem was the change in capitalization. In the first version (A Word…) the words sun and death are capitalized, and in Out of the Cradle, they are not. I was really curious why he did this, especially with sun, because it’s harder for me to see the reasoning behind that one. One possible theory I had for that is that when sun was capitalized, (Pour down your warmth, great Sun!) it personifies and addresses the sun,whereas taking away the capitalization, while still addressing the sun, takes away the emphasis from it. Since he didn’t seem to personify much else within the poem, I thought maybe he just changed it because he thought it was too random and didn’t necessarily fit with the rest of the text.

The change in capitalization of the word death was more drastic. This is the original passage:

Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word DEATH;

And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death,

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird, nor like my arous’d child’s heart,

But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet,

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears, and laving me softly all over,

Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.

In the deathbed edition though, every thing is lowercase. I can see why Whitman would have wanted to change that, mostly because it seemed like in this edition he was trying to make the poem more generalized, and I think maybe he thought there was too much emphasis on “death” when that wasn’t necessarily where he wanted the emphasis (though it was most definitely an important aspect of the poem). When I read the 1867 version though, this section, and up until the end was really powerful to me, aided by the all caps DEATH and then the subsequent capitalizations. Reading the 1891 version removed that powerfulness for me. The first time around I felt like Whitman was shouting at me, the second time just calmly reading to me. Going along with this, I didn’t like the way he added in the second to last line in the 1891 version:

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)

It completely took me out of the poem in a way that didn’t happen in the 1867 version. I thought maybe he was trying to connect the images of the cradle and then the previously mentioned nagging mother, but it didn’t work for me. I thought the first version was way more powerful. It just really makes me wonder what he was thinking while making all of these revisions.

I think it is possibly this program here  (I am encouraged by the Whitman quote on the top of the page) but none of the episode descriptions mention a man building a field a la “Field of Dreams.” If I ever manage to find a clip of it I will post it here, but I thought I’d throw this out there in case anyone knew anything about it.

One thing I did find out through my searches: there are lots of little league teams named after Whitman.

 Sex.

Right.

Even though Whitman uses a lot of sexual and sensual language in his poetry, I have a really hard time accepting the speaker as a sexual being. I don’t really feel like Whitman spoke to me here. In “Song of Myself” I felt really connected to a lot of those passages, there were some beautiful passages and lines that I absolutely loved. In Children of Adam, I’m not really moved (I wanted to say touched but I feel like that might be awkward…) by anything he says. It was the first time I didn’t underline anything in the text, or mark anything. I just kind of sat there thinking “Alright it’s steamy, but when’s it gonna get more profound than my grandma’s romance novels?” I wanted more from the text than intertwining, sweating bodies.

Calamus however, was a different story. Even though it was less overt than Children of Adam, there was so much more passion behind the writing. I particularly liked “Trickle Drops.” At times a little cliche, but I loved the image of “saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet.” The entire set of poems here just seem filled with so much more life and feeling than Children of Adam. I could just be reading into this because I am considering Whitman’s sexuality, but the imagery is so much stronger to me. I thought it was interesting as well that in Children of Adam, the imagery had more to do with people themselves, and in Calamus there was a lot of nature imagery as well as some city imagery. While Children of Adam had some of that, those images factored in much more prominently in Calamus. I got the sense that maybe Whitman was suggesting that this “robust love” he was describing was both natural and progressive, especially compared to the way he presented heterosexual relationships. 

Just as a side note, I wanted to say that “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” reminded me of this tree I saw this summer when I visited Charleston:

The Angel Oak in Charleston, South Carolina

Not my picture, but a better idea of what it looks like up close.

Obviously Whitman is a supporter of women’s rights, I don’t doubt that. He is clear when addressing the reader that he means “man or woman,” “he or she,” etc. Something that bothers me though is the lack of women taking part in Whitman’s America. He writers that “a great city is that which has the greatest men and women” (p.335). There is no mention though of women ever helping to create that city. Whitman writes of “the six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam” but where are the women helping to lay the foundation? There is no reference to men and women building the nation together. Furthermore, as far as I have read, Whitman never takes women out of their traditionally assigned gender roles of being mothers, housewives and shop girls. While you could argue Whitman was portraying life as he saw it, I believe there’s more to it than that. I think that Whitman does believe women are equal to men, and that their voices should be heard and listened to in earnest, but he doesn’t suggest that women should work alongside men. He keeps them in the home, or working at sewing machines. Even when he tells the reader in “Song of Occupations” that “the wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband…the mother, and she is every bit as much as the father” (p. 356). There is no mention of simply the woman being equal to the man. He writes of men building up the nation, and then they will eventually raise women and slaves to be their equals.  Where is the woman fighting for her right to vote? Where is the woman fighting for equal pay or job opportunities? Why are these not images he included in his sweeping and romantic descriptions of America? Even when referring to slaves, he portrays them as downtrodden people who he must nurture and care for, who could do nothing, achieve nothing without his help.

In my opinion, Whitman likes the idea of women and slaves having equal rights, but he writes about it more as a passing interest than something he is deeply convicted of. I hate to end another blog in suspicion, but Whitman leaves me no choice.

“I tramp a perpetual journey,

My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff

cut from the woods;

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooks you round the waist,

My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a

plain public road.

 

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.”

Simple question, complex answer. There are so many facets to the connection Whitman tries to establish with the reader. At times he is impersonal and worldly, and at other times he is exclusive and intimate. The aim of the poem seems to switch from addressing the world and everyone it in, to simply addressing the reader, and telling them what he thinks. There were times when I was reading that I felt as if Whitman were convincing me that what he was saying was unique, wonderful and solely for me. Whitman tells me,

“This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.”

He puts me in the position of confidant, as secret keeper. I alone am hearing his deepest thoughts, things he has been longing to tell someone. In the biography we read, it mentions how Whitman wanted to reach through the pages and physically touch the reader. I found that interesting when thinking about how often Whitman mentions touching another person, whether it’s clasping their hand or putting his arm around their waist, or an allusion to sex.

“Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.”

The sensuality he wants to establish between himself and the reader, as well as the way he convinces the reader that what they are reading is private and for them makes me think of a love letter.  While the poem seems to be a love letter to Whitman himself, as well as nature and life, I read it as a love letter to the reader as well.

            While Whitman wants the reader to believe he is telling them vast and important secrets, he also seems to be imploring the reader to believe him and think as he does. It’s a love letter to someone that he’s not sure returns his love at all, so he needs to convince us that his love is worthwhile, and it’s going to last, that he really knows what he is talking about.

            “I know perfectly well my own egotism,

            And I know my omniverous words, and cannot say any less,

            And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.”

            He wants to hold me captive in his thoughts, to see things the way he sees them. He is using his charm full force, but as a reader, do I fall for it? It’s easy to be blinded by someone’s outpouring of passion for you, but do I really believe all the things Whitman tells me? We’ll see.