JOURNAL 10

WALT WHITMAN

from Song of Myself

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, not to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,

They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

I wonder where they get those tokens,

Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

Myself moving forward then and now and forever,

Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,

Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,

Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,

Picking out here on that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,

Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,

Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,

Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,

His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.

I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,

Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?

Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

In this free verse, 26-line selection from “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman compares the concerns of animals to those of humans and declares his desire to be among the animals.  He uses a thrilling combination of direct observation and vivid description to tangle the reader up in his own web of opinion and longing. The free verse form offers the freedom for Whitman to express his thoughts as if he is giving an impassioned speech.  His early use of repetition (“They do not,” “Not one.”) further allows the reader to apply the force Whitman seeks to convey, altogether creating a meticulous set of moral themes to ponder.

WENDELL BERRY

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.

Where, as it is presented as in excerpt in Wild Reckoning, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” charges forth as a horse just out of the gate, Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” begins slowly and in the dark of night.  He offers a distinct time and place for the reader to settle into as he speaks.  He does arrive, however, to meet Whitman’s feeling of freedom among the animals and wild things of the earth.  Both poets pause at times to consider the meaning of the small items that make up a greater entity—Whitman speaks of the tokens of himself that he has unknowingly lost and that the animals bring back to him, Berry reminds us of the day-blind stars that wait with their light.  I was particularly taken by these two images and am encouraged to think of the little things—changes, feelings and actions—that we can take to move our way of live to return to the simplicity undertaken by the wild things.

Bear

Early in the morn she’s poking at my face.

Humans are the only beings to make their own schedules—

All the rest either rise with the sun and grow sleepy at dusk,

Or honor their special abilities that challenge this course.

We—require fuel and flame to lengthen the time that we see.

I brush her off and doze back

to the dreamscape induced by the mugwort ‘neath my head.

When I finally wake she’s at my feet—

Gazing up, moving with me and meowing incessantly.

What doe she say? I cannot truly know,

But the crackle of a bag and the snap of a can halts her sound.

She walks so gingerly among by things,

Sniffing and poking, exploring and asking questions with her paws.

Then suddenly the scene has changed and ears

Fold down, body crouches: the sign of eminent danger—

For the feather ball to which she trains her eye.

The back end swishes and her front paws quiver

And all at once

—the POUNCE.

Delight streams forth: all paws kick, teeth swipe, body rolls,

Then up on her feet jumping straight up in the air.

Sometimes as she’s curled up at my side I

Realize the wilderness I’ve brought inside,

But that’s not true—

Maybe I knew,

When I chose to name her Bear.

___

Whitman, Walt. “from A Song of Myself.” Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent

     Spring. Ed. Burnside, John, Maurice Riordan. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004. 125. Print.

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems, 1957-1982. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985. Print.