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Leaves of Grass March 20, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland The author of the Gospel of Mark wrote that when Jesus rode into Jerusalem “people cut leafy branches from the fields.” Matthew speaks of “branches from the trees.” Only John’s Gospel specifies “branches of palm trees.” Following John’s Gospel, we call this day Palm Sunday, which has a better sound to it than “leafy branches Sunday.” One Bible scholar says that palm branches symbolize triumph and victory, but I wonder: perhaps the reference to leafy branches in the gospel of Mark might be an attempt by the writer to include references to ancient spring celebrations and festivities. Perhaps after months of winter the ancient people of the middle east used green leafy branches to symbolize the coming of warmer days. This spring I associate the word leafy in Mark’s Gospel with the book Leaves of Grass. This Fourth of July will be the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman’s first book of poems. Today, on the day before the first day of spring, I think of how these poems celebrate nature. In winter we live inside most of the time. Whitman’s words draw my attention out of my home to the smells of the earth and the grass. Whitman said:
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes; I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it; The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless; It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it; I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked; I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath; Echoes, ripples, buzzed whispers, loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine; My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs; The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn; The sound of the belched words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind; A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms; The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag; The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides; The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
The author of these words was born on Long Island in 1819, the second child in a family of nine. His father was a farmer, a carpenter and probably an alcoholic, who struggled to support the large family. Walt’s mother was a Quaker who labored to care for her children. Seven of the nine children survived childhood to become adults. The youngest son probably had Downs Syndrome. When Whitman died in 1892, he left all his estate to the support of his youngest brother. The family moved from Long Island to Brooklyn when Walt was four. In Brooklyn Walt attended District School Number 1, Brooklyn’s only public school. His school day began with Bible reading, followed by grammar, dictation, spelling, vocabulary, arithmetic, geography and penmanship. The method of teaching was rote memorization. Discipline was quasi-military. Years later Whitman wrote a short story called “Death in the School-Room” which tells about a sick child who dies during class. The teacher thinks the boy is sleeping in class and whips the dead child to punish him. The story suggests that school was not a positive experience for young Walt. At the age of eleven Whitman left school and went to work as an office boy. He also got a membership in a Brooklyn circulating library giving him access to books, which he later described as the key event of his childhood. In his teenage years Whitman worked in a print shop setting type. When he turned seventeen, he returned to Long Island to work as a teacher. He hated teaching, but he loved the countryside of Long Island. At the age of nineteen he founded his own newspaper called The Long-Islander. The newspaper continued to exist until the 1980s, but Whitman’s role ended quickly. Those who knew Whitman as a 20-year-old described him as a dreamy loafer. One woman said “Whenever Whitman came home from the printing office for lunch, after eating he would go out into the garden, lie on his back under the apple tree, and forget everything about going to work as he gazed up at the blossoms and the sky.” Fifteen years later, in Leaves of Grass Whitman wrote: I CELEBRATE myself; And what I assume you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my Soul; I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. When he was 22, Whitman returned to Brooklyn to both set type and to write for newspapers. In 1842, he heard a lecture on poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson dismissed the miracles in the New Testament, and suggested that the future of religion and scripture belonged to the poets who could describe the experience of God in nature. For eight more years Whitman continued to work for newspapers, setting type and writing articles living mostly with his mother and father in Brooklyn. For three months in 1848 he and a younger brother did move to New Orleans. In both Brooklyn and New Orleans his newspaper writing had a moralistic tone. His family’s alcoholism caused him to write in support of the temperance movement, which at the time was against hard liquor, but tolerant of beer and wine. Whitman wrote against slavery, against the death penalty, for women’s rights, and for workers’ rights. He pleaded the case of the poor, the prostitute, the abandoned or the mentally retarded child. He wrote in support of the moral code of religion but he rejected what he called the “religious superstitions of mankind.” Because his editors did not always share his social or political views, Whitman changed newspaper jobs frequently. In 1849, at the age of thirty, the owners of an anti slavery newspaper fired Whitman, ending forever his full-time career in journalism. Whitman resorted to freelancing, writing the kinds of feature articles that today we associate with a newspaper’s Sunday magazine. Simultaneously a book of poems began to take shape in his mind. Most American poets before Whitman took as their models English poems that used recurrent patterns of sounds or meters, which by the 19th century generally meant the i-am-bic unit. In contrast, Whitman wrote free verse, poetry that does not rhyme, and does not have a meter. He abandoned the structure that had served the upper classes where poetry was the pastime of gentlemen who enjoyed economic privilege. He replaced it with a sort of parallelism, where each line sounds its own idea, which is parallel to the next idea. In this way Whitman celebrated America. For example, about farming he wrote:
The big doors of the country-barn stand open and ready, The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon, The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertwined, The armfuls are packed to the sagging mow: I am there . . . . I help . . . . I came stretched atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts . . . . one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the crossbeams, and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair full of wisps. His poems reflected his deep love of this nation. About sailing he wrote:
The Yankee clipper is under her three skysails . . . . she cuts the sparkle and scud, My eyes settle on the land . . . . I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.
The boatmen and clam diggers arose early and stopped for me, I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time, You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.
He described what he saw on the Mississippi on his way to New Orleans: I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far-west . . . . the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near by crosslegged and dumbly smoking . . . . they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders; On a bank lounged the trapper . . . . he was dressed mostly in skins . . . . his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, One hand rested on his rifle . . . . the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl, She had long eyelashes . . . . her head was bare . . . . her coarse straight locks descended upon her vo-lup-tuous limbs and reached to her feet. And he described a great moral issue in America: The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limp and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet, And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north, I had him sit next me at table . . . . my firelock leaned in the corner. At times some claim that he was a Unitarian. His mother was a Quaker. As a child he attended an Episcopal church. As an adult the Unitarian minister Emerson was one of his heros. However, I have found no evidence that the poet ever joined a Unitarian Church. In Leaves of Grass Whitman wrote: I do not despise you, priests; My faith is the greatest of faiths, and the least of faiths, Enclosing worship ancient and modern, and all between ancient and modern. Whitman never married, and today most scholars believe that he was homosexual. We know for certain that he believed human sexuality was a wonderful part of nature. In celebration of the human body he included sexual images in his poems, which created problems. This was at a time before radio or television when in the evening parents would often read books to the family from the light of one lamp. Few families were interested in reading such poems aloud. In July 1855, Whitman gave the first copies of his book to a bookseller in Brooklyn. The seller apparently found it offensive and ordered its removal the next day. Eventually Whitman convinced a business that sold books about health fads also to sell the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Most reviews were negative, but in a letter to Whitman Emerson wrote: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Whitman carried the letter around Brooklyn in his pocket for weeks. Whitman spent the rest of his life nurturing his book through one edition after another with little financial security. He spent the Civil War living in Washington nursing the wounded. After the war he became a clerk in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, from which he was dismissed on the grounds that Leaves of Grass was an immoral book. During his last nineteen years he lived in Camden, New Jersey. He died in 1892 at the age of seventy-two and was buried in Camden. According to his most recent biographer, now-a-days Camden’s pre adolescent youth, children of working-class Blacks and Hispanics, skateboard and bike in the cemetery. Every one of them seems to know wherein the cemetery the author of Leaves of Grass is buried. In the Gospel of Mark it is written that when Jesus rode into Jerusalem many “people cut leafy branches from the fields.” It may be a reference to ancient spring celebrations and festivities. In the same way, from all of nature, Walt Whitman selected the grass as his principle symbol of God’s love. He writes:
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is, any more than he.
. . . I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrance, designedly dropped, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, . . . the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic; And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white; Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, I give them the same, I receive them the same. . . The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. |
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