An Unfailing Sufficiency: Up Late, Thinking About Whitman

All this week, I've been waking up at some point during the night, and then I'm awake for an hour or so before I can go back to sleep. I recently read an article that said a lot of people do this and it is apparently normal, and that's probably where I got the idea. I'm getting a little tired of it, though--I like nights when I sleep straight through.

I do various things with my hour. Sometimes I read a book, if I've got one going, or watch a little TV. Or check my e-mail and write long notes to friends. But tonight, I'm thinking about Walt Whitman, which I'm sure is how many insomniacs spend their nights.

Specifically, I'm thinking about Walt Whitman, and me as a high school freshman reading him for the first time in American Literature. The Whitman poems we read in class--and we're talking about 1979, here, so my memory may be faulty--were the most schoolroom-ish of his poems. We read "O Captain, My Captain," probably because it was short and it rhymed and it had no sex in it. But it's a terrible introduction to Whitman, a weak example of his work and not at all typical. I'm sure we read When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. And we read, I seem to remember, Starting from Paumanok, though looking at it again that seems unlikely, what with "sexual organs and acts" there in line 178. It was either "Starting from Paumanok," or one of the other boring ones.

Anyway, it wasn't a very auspicious introduction, yet somehow I fell in love. I think part of why I fell in love was my American Literature teacher, whom I did not, overall, care for, because he was dismissive of me, and he looked at my breasts a lot, and his idea of a final exam in literature was to have us memorize 100 titles and publication dates. But I seem to remember him reading aloud from Whitman in class, and reading well, and reading with passion. And I remember a poem I hadn't liked on the page becoming more alluring when I heard him read it.

Anyway, I bought a copy of Leaves of Grass at the bookstore in the mall.

I tell you, of all the things I've ever gotten rid of in my life, that first copy of Leaves of Grass is one of two I regret. It was just a cheap Signet edition, and I carried it around with me from 1979 until just a few years ago, so it was spine-broken and the pages were starting to come unglued. I had marked the poems I liked with paper clips, and they rusted and left marks. It was in terrible shape, and it made sense to let it go and get a nicer copy. But I shouldn't have done it.

Anyway, those paper clips would be an interesting glimpse into my teenage psyche. I was intimidated by the longer poems; they were just incomprehensible to me. But I loved, for instance, "I Saw In Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing," and I memorized it so well that I believe I can recite it to this day. It's short enough to just give it to you right here:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

I loved this poem for what it said about friendship, which of course was the most important thing in my life at 14 and 15 and 16. I liked it because I imagined Whitman saw that tree while taking a long solitary ramble, which was something I also did a lot of. I liked the sound of "rude, unbending, lusty." It was one of the first poems I ever read that seemed to me to be speaking my own thoughts.

Another little fragment I adored--and memorized, which was easy because it's only about 3 lines, was this:

O you, whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near you, or remain in the same room with you,
Little know you the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

I believe that, more than once, as a young lesbian, I slipped a woman a note with this poem written in it as an act of seduction.

But the poem I loved best as a teenager and young adult is a longer poem called "To You," which distinguishes it not at all from a number of Whitman's poems that start in exactly that same way. Here it is.

By God, I loved that poem, and I still do. As a teenager, I felt that Whitman was speaking right to me, in all my adolescent insecurity, and his voice was tremendously reassuring:

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;
There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you;
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you;
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

Nobody but Whitman was saying things like that to me, God knows. I loved its tallying of my gifts, its promises for the future.

But I also loved the egalitarianism of the poem:

Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

It took me awhile, as a teenager, to parse that image, but once I got it, I loved it. Whitman was saying: Everybody gets a halo.

I loved Whitman's commitment to the male and the female in this poem. His relationship to the female is pretty complicated, and not always what we might wish it to be, but look at him here! I have spent my life listening to people say we can't use "he and she" in writing because it's ugly, but look how he builds it into the driving, building rhythm of these lines. Maybe you or I can't make it beautiful, but Whitman did:

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;
These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they;
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

And, finally, Whitman includes in this poem a notion that I love, the idea of sufficiency. We talk a lot these days about abundance, but Whitman doesn't so much. He likes to say that something will "prove sufficient." He simultaneously makes you extravagant promises--he sings the songs of the glory of none sooner than he sings the songs of the glory of you, after all--and reminds you of the imperfect body and world you live in: your unsteady eye, your drunkenness, your greed, your deform'd attitude, your premature death, all of these are mentioned in the poem as well.

But listen to the closing lines of the poem:

The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself;
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

That's my Walt. "The means are provided, nothing is scanted." I find those to be about the most comforting words I've ever read.

I wonder how many hours in total I spent as a teenager declaiming this poem in the solitude of my room. I know that for a long time I had it memorized, too, and it is a great poem for reading, or reciting, aloud. It has a thundering rhythm. I remember reading a book that talked about Whitman being influenced by the cadences of the preachers of the Second Great Awakening, and this is surely an exhortation. I think you could deliver this poem as a sermon, punctuating your words with the book in your hand, like a preacher with a Bible.

I don't believe I've said anything about Whitman I haven't said before, and some of you have certainly heard me say it. I don't suppose I should expect to be original at three in the morning when what I really want is to be sleeping. But this is all something I like to revisit from time to time. I've been reading these poems for over 30 years now, and while a poem like "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" is in some ways a trifle, "To You" has never let me down yet.