A Day with Walt Whitman

 
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all, or mistress of all – aplomb in the midst of irrational things.
 

And now he was an old man, to look upon, – yet a man surcharged with electric vigour and daily renewing his physical strength from the fountains of eternal youth. He was just as full of élan, of enterprise, of the glorious hunger for adventure, as when first he had proclaimed, —

 
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
 
 
Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys;
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you – however long, but it stretches and waits for you;
To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither.
 

(Song of the Open Road.)

The big grey man expanded almost visibly in the sun-steeped air, as he absorbed the exquisite minutiæ of the green dell into his mind, and assimilated the music of the wind and stream. Sound of any sort had a powerfully emotional effect upon him. It was not mere fancy on Whitman's part that "he and Wagner made one music." With music on the most colossal scale his poems are fraught from end to end: and while their technical form may be less finished, less perfected, than those of other authors, – while they have less melody, they have the multitudinous harmony, the superb architectonics, the choral and symphonic movement of the noblest masters. "Such poems as The Mystic Trumpeter, Out of the Cradle, Passage to India, have the genesis and exodus of great musical compositions." And to many auditors, the "vast elemental sympathy" of this unique personality can only be compared to that of Beethoven, whom he said he had "discovered as a new meaning in music: " Beethoven, by whom he allowed he "had been carried out of himself, seeing, hearing wonders: " Beethoven, who, like himself, sought inspiration continuously in the magic and mystery of Nature.

THE LUMBERMEN'S CAMP

 
Lumbermen in their winter camp, day-break in the woods, stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,
The glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song, the natural life of the woods, the strong day's work,
The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs, and the bear-skin.
 

(Song of the Broad-Axe).

And thus, all Whitman's finest poems have a processional air, like the evolution of some great symphony – a pageantry of sound, so to speak, which whirls one forward like a leaf upon a resistless stream. Sometimes he is superbly triumphant, as in his inaugural Song of Myself:

 
With music strong I come – with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only,
I play great marches for conquer'd and slain persons.
 

Sometimes he translates the sonorities of the air into immortal effluences of meaning:

 
Hark, some wild trumpeter – some strange musician,
Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night…
 
 
Blow, trumpeter, free and clear – I follow thee,
While at thy liquid prelude, glad, serene,
The fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day, withdraw;
 

or he blends all sorts and conditions of beautiful resonance into, surely, the strangest yet loveliest love-song ever yet set down:

 
I heard you, solemn-sweet pipes of the organ, as last Sunday morn I pass'd the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walked the woods at dusk, I heard your long-stretch'd sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you, when all was still, ringing little bells last night under my ear.
 

But now the precious hour had arrived, which to Whitman spelt revivification and rejuvenescence above all others: the time when, stripped of all externals, he became the very child of Mother Earth. In his own description of the process:

"A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath… So, hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet … then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook – taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses … slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun … somehow I seemed to get identity with each and everything around me, in its condition. Perhaps the inner, never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body." (Specimen Days.)

Power and joy and exhilaration infused his whole frame. "Here," he murmured, "I realize the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to Nature: never before did she come so close to me."

And a miracle of transient transformation had been wrought upon him. His youth was "renewed like the eagle's," his lameness hardly perceptible, as he reluctantly emerged from the sweet water, and, having dried himself in the sun-glow, still more reluctantly dressed again. This was no longer the "battered, wrecked old man," the veteran of life-long battles with the world: but one who could realize with keenest perception every sensation of stalwart strength. He might have been, at this moment, one of his own "lumbermen in their winter camp," enjoying

 
Day-break in the woods, stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,
The glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song, the natural life of the woods, the strong day's work,
The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs, and the bear-skin.
 

(Song of the Broad-Axe.)

or a scion of the "youthful sinewy races," whom he had chanted in Pioneers:

 
Come, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharpedged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!..
 
 
All the past we leave behind!