Sherry Chandler

Every time I think I’ve wrapped my head around Whitman

I find something that surprises me:

This Compost

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the door-yards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

— Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1900

And the answer

Ah but we always have to come back home from the beach. The poem I posted yesterday is part of a famous pair. Here is Sir Walter Raleigh’s reply to Kit Marlowe’s pastoralism:

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten
In folly ripe, in season rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

— Sir Walter Raleigh

In a pastoral mood

I’ve been neglecting the blog here lately. Just in a lazy mid-summer state of mind I guess — sort of at the spiritual beach.

So when I ran across this golden oldy today, I thought why not share it. It’s good sometimes to revisit our old friends.

The Passionate Shepher to His Love

Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber-studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

— Christopher Marlowe

Five cats, a guitar, and an engraving

This Polaroid snap was taken in 1976 in an apartment on Woodland Avenue in Chicago. The cats in the foreground are Cynthia, Gremlin, Griddlebone, and Jenny-any-dots. Over behind the guitar case is the matriarch Teufelsdröckh.

To see the Dürer referenced below, follow this link.

From Santa Lucia

          . . . All women
are masochists. I was so young, believing
every word they said. Dürer is second rate.
Dürer’s Eve feeds her apple to the snake;
snaky tresses, cat at her feet, at Adam’s foot
a mouse. Male fear, male eyes and art.

— Robert Hass, Praise (The Ecco Press, 1979)

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

I’ve been reading and reading about Sarah Piatt and, since this has been my subject matter for a while, I thought that I pretty much had to share her poem about Daniel Boone.

Paula Bernat Bennet includes this poem, published in 1872, among Piatt’s Civil War poems.

Piatt treats the past as if it were always with her, writing in multiple time frames at once. In the complicated perspective enjoined on her by this three-dimensional view of time, not just her home state of Kentucky but all of America was a “Dark and Bloody ground”: and at its center stood Piatt’s enigmatic kinsman, Daniel Boone, pioneer, Indian-killer, slaveholder, the quintessential American, the man with a gun. She could not escape this relationship; it was written into the past and into her living blood and into the blood of her sons and daughter as well. [Bennet, xlii- xliii]

I feel constrained to point out here that Daniel Boone was not much of an Indian killer. He may have killed three in his lifetime. It is out mythology that had to make him such a thing — the quintessential American, the man with a gun.

The Grave at Frankfort

I turned and threw my rose upon the mound
      Beneath whose grass my old, rude kinsman lies,
And thought had from his Dark and Bloody Ground
      The blood secured in shape of flowers to rise.

I left his dust to dew and dimness then,
      Who did not need the glitter of mock stars
To show his homely generalship to men
      And light his shoulders through his troubled wars.

I passed his rustling wild-cane, reached the gate,
      And heard the city’s noisy murmurings;
Forgot the simple hero of my State,
      I looked in the gaslight, thought of other things.

Ah, that was many withered springs ago;
      Yet once, last winter, in the whirl of snows,
A vague half-fever, or, for aught I know,
      A wish to touch the hand that gave my rose,

Showed me a hunter of the wooded West,
      With dog and gun, beside his cabin door;
And, in the strange fringed garments on his breast,
      I recognized at once the rose he wore!

—Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, from Palace-Burner. The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, Paula Bernat Bennett, ed. (Univ Illinois Press, 2001)

Mr. Whitman has a birthday

and it’s Memorial Day so I thought maybe I’d give you this one for today, though for my family Decoration Day is not limited to soldiers but more about honoring all your family dead:

A March in the Ranks, Hard-prest

A MARCH in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown;
A route through a heavy wood, with muffled steps in the darkness;
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating;
Till after midnight glimmer upon us, the lights of a dim-lighted building;
We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building;
’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads—’tis now an impromptu hospital;
—Entering but for a minute, I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made:
Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,
And by one great pitchy torch, stationary, with wild red flame, and clouds of smoke;
By these, crowds, groups of forms, vaguely I see, on the floor, some in the pews laid down;
At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;)
I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;)
Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene, fain to absorb it all;
Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead;
Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood;
The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms of soldiers—the yard outside also fill’d;
Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating;
An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls;
The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches;
These I resume as I chant—I see again the forms, I smell the odor;
Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, Fall in;
But first I bend to the dying lad—his eyes open—a half-smile gives he me;
Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,
Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,
The unknown road still marching.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, [c1900]; Bartleby.com, 1999.

Let me point you also to Helen Losse’s excellent Memorial Day poem “Shifting Paradigm” at Rusty Truck, along with their nine other Memorial Day Poems.

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

A Tragedy of a Night
(At an Edinburgh Street-Crossing)

She started suddenly from the moving mass,
      The wind sprang up and caught her by the shawl,
And held her like a thing that dared not pass—
     Then shook her for an instant. That was all.

Once beautiful and still almost a child!
     She wore her wet hair round her with a grace.
I saw the great eyes staring black and wild
     As the scared lamplight shuddered from her face.

Upon her track there followed such a cry:
     Will you come back, or no?” was all it said.
“Will you come back, or no?” The Voice wailed by;
     On—to the Pit?—the girlish phantom fled.

—Sarah Piatt, from Palace-Burner. The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, Paula Bernat Bennett, ed. (Univ Illinois Press, 2001)