Memorial Day

For Memorial Day, one of the simplest, most controlled poems of Walt Whitman, taken from his collection of Civil War poems, Drum Taps:

Dirge for Two Veterans

The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish'd Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.

Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key'd bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they're flooding,
As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)

Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin'd,
('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.

Thanks to all who have served.

"Much has been said of its coarseness," or, Some notes on poets and reviews

Today's offerings from the ol' literary steam tray: a few somewhat connected notes on poets and reviews:

1 In the course of confirming the other day that Walt Whitman, for all his exuberance, was not the tipsy poetic champion of the American outdoors that I was looking for, I happened across a fascinating contemporary review of Leaves of Grass. Published anonymously in the June 8, 1867 issue of the London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Society, Literature, and Art, it is now available in the Whitman archive.

The passage that led the review to be delivered up as a result of my Google search for "Whitman drunk" was this one:

That there is genius in these poems is unquestionable; yet it is difficult to assign their author any place in literature, unless, indeed, one may assume the veracity of metempsychosis, and say that here is Hafiz again, only drunk now with Catawba wine instead of the Saoma, and worshipping the Mississippi river instead of the Saravati, which, having dried up in Persia, may be supposed to have also transmigrated westward.

Lots of references to clear up there: Hafiz is a classical Persian poet, the Catawba is a wine grape from the eastern United States (as well as a Native American tribe), Saoma appears to be a creek, often dry, in Vanuatu, and the Saravati is the Saraswati, a holy Hindu river. That's a fairly longwinded way for the reviewer to point out that Whitman had expanded his reach to draw on Eastern traditions, especially as the reviewer goes on to point out that Leaves of Grass

is really meant to be, and is, intensely American. It is but just, however, to say that the America it celebrates is a transcendental one, related to the world and the distant stars, and not "Uncle Sam's" fenced-in national farm.

{Side note: I love that Uncle Sam was still a new enough concept that it needed to be set off in quotes.}

Still, the reviewer deserves credit for clearly grasping the quality and originality of Whitman's vision. Though he acknowledges that Whitman "is not a poet for the family circle, nor is his book one which could be allowed into everybody's hands," he ultimately offers praise that seems to truly understand Whitman's poetic aims:

There is a wild, natural exuberance of animalism displayed by Whitman of a thoroughly original kind, an open-air abandonment, a weird and exalted receptivity embracing the good and the bad, the vice and the virtue of life, with a power and comprehensiveness as striking as it is novel. If he will but learn to tame a little, America will at last have a genuine American poet.

2 I've enjoyed reading contemporary reviews of established classics ever since a professor in college lent me a volume of contemporary reviews of Dickens's novels; remembering the clash of opinions and the virulence with which they were put forth is a help when I find myself too deep in the book review world of our own era. And speaking of drunk poets, I wonder whether any of Edgar Allan Poe's reviews of Dickens were in that volume--for, as Jill Lepore reminds us in her excellent article on Poe in last week's New Yorker, Poe wrote two reviews of Barnaby Rudge.

Strangely enough, while Lepore calls one of the reviews--in Graham's Magazine--unfavorable, The Poe Encyclopedia (1997) describes it, as well as Poe's review for Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post, "extremely laudatory." The passages they cite, however, seem to lean more towards Lepore's position: they note that though Poe praised Dicken as a masterly "delineator of character," he faulted him for his ramshackle plots, and closed by writing,

He has done this thing well, to be sure--he would do anything well compared to the herd of his contemporaries--but he has not done it so thoroughly well as his high and just reputation would demand. We think that the whole book has been an effort to him--solely through the nature of its design.

Poe did, however, send Dickens the reviews, along with an invitation to meet, which Dickens took up--so perhaps Poe's assessment was more favorable it appears.

3 Poe, that "scarecrow figure" with his "half-lynched mind," as V. S. Pritchett described him, might be a contender for the mantle of tipsy poetic champion of American nature, except that he didn't write all that much about nature, and what he did write so often carries more than a whiff of death and decay. While "To the River ____" might fit the bill--

Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow
Of beauty--the unhidden heart--
The playful maziness of art
In old Alberto's daughter;

But when within thy wave she looks--
Which glistens then, and trembles--
Why, then, the prettiest of brooks
Her worshipper resembles;
For in his heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies--
His heart which trembles at the beam
Of her soul-searching eyes.

--the essence of Poe seems to reside more in "The Lake--To ----":

In Spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less –
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody
Then - ah, then, I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight –
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define –
Nor Love - although the love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining –
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Which, you'll surely agree, offers a very different tone than the poems of Lu Yu that started me on this quest.


4 Finally, no post on Poe and reviews would be complete without the story of Poe's own high opinion of "The Raven." I've drawn on it before, so the only teaser I'll give is that in the hours after writing it he was adament that it was "the greatest poem ever written." Go read the whole account; you won't regret it.

A return to Abraham Lincoln, about whom one can never read enough

From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" (1865), by Walt Whitman:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my soul for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from the east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

My post last week on dreams featured a pair of dreams attributed to Abraham Lincoln that supposedly foretold his death, which led a friend to admit to having been obsessed with Lincoln as a girl. In particular, she was fascinated with the better-known of the dreams I wrote about, the one known as Lincoln's Dream. She says:

i came to lincoln's dream when i was about six and a half--very shortly after i could read books with chapters--my precocious childhood obsession was politics, elections, and presidents, paired with the moody irish catholic fascination with the supernatural. i used to drape a comforter over my head (and body) to leave my room at night so that lincoln wouldn't recognize me as one of the living. the neighborhood kids and i would stage plays in our garage and yell out, "who is dead in the white house?" this lent itself, of course, to a healthy adult fascination with spiritualism as the product of the hybrid forms of 'experimental' 'feminine' consciousness available in the 19th century & many attempted postmodern sonnet sequences on the life of mary todd lincoln.

Yes, I suppose that is where an obsession with Lincoln's dream is likely to lead a smart and book-loving young woman, isn't it?

Meanwhile, in searching out accounts of Lincoln's Dream, I came across a poem called "Lincoln's Dream" by Dan Chiasson that in the New Yorker this spring, 142 years to the week after Lincoln's assassination. It jumbles Lincoln and Chiasson and all of us up in a vertiginous reminder of mortality--while simultaneously replicating the air of the uncanny that the dreaming Lincoln seemingly felt as he wandered the mourning White House. It's worth a trip to the New Yorker's site.

And then there's Walt Whitman, whose pen was busy in the weeks following Lincoln's death:

This Dust Was Once the Man

This dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute--under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.

It's easy (especially living in Illinois) to get overly wrapped up in and impressed by Lincoln, to allow oneself to be gobsmacked by his moral seriousnes, his dedication, his determination, and his preternatural deftness at reading people and situations. As Ulysses Grant, no mean leader of men himself (his presidency aside), said, "I have no doubt that Lincoln will be seen as the conspicuous figure of the war. He was indisputably the greatest man I ever knew."

Yet much as I admire him, I know of course that Lincoln was far from perfect--and I know that remembering that no person or leader can or will be perfect is essential to avoiding the short-circuiting of thought that is a first step on the road to totalitarianism. Analyses of Lincoln's shortcomings--his questionable stances on civil liberties and the prospects of America's freed slaves, for example--are worthy and important.

But for today, as we approach yet another Independence Day with that dishonest, callous, dismal wreck of a man battened down in the White House, I need a reminder that real leaders, truly good men, once walked those same halls. So for today I'll stay with the Lincoln of grade school, the Lincoln who saved the Union, the Lincoln who in his Second Inaugural had the temerity--unthinkable in our current political climate--to suggest that our view of right may be clouded.

We may not know, in his construction, that we understand the will of God, that we do the right thing or are on the right side. But that by no means lessens our responsibility to hew to what we believe to be the correct path, no matter the obstacles, at the same time as it increases our awareness of our responsibility to always recall the humanity that we share with even our fiercest opponents. Bush's blustering attempts to claim the mantle of such stalwart leaders as Lincoln and Churchill are perpetually belied by the complete absence of any of the compassion, humanity, or humility that ring through Lincoln's words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.