The Gift (27 page)

And so on; the list includes thirteen gods. Whitman was not a scholar of these things—he took most of his information from newspapers and popular novels—but his intuitive grasp was strong. He was able to flesh out an image by sensing what was still alive in it for his own purposes and experience.

In the Astor Library in New York, sometime during 1855, Whitman came across a huge compendium of etchings of Egyptian hieroglyphs and tomb carvings that had been
published fifteen years previously by an Italian archaeologist. One of these etchings, reproduced here, shows a version of the resurrection of the dead Osiris. A libation is being poured over Osiris’s coffin, out of which grow twenty-eight stalks of wheat. We do not know if Whitman studied this particular drawing, but it seems likely. In 1856 he published “Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat” (later, “This Compost”), one of whose lines could serve as a caption for the drawing: “The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves…”

There are many conflicting accounts of the story of Osiris, but all agree on certain elements. Osiris was a god-king who ruled Egypt in ancient times. His brother, Set, jealous of his power, killed him by trapping him in a box and floating it down the Nile. Isis, who was both Osiris’s sister and wife, retrieved the body and brought it back to Egypt. Set found it again, however, and, tearing it apart, scattered the limbs. In some versions of the story, Isis gathered the limbs, put the body back together, and then lay with her husband to bring him back to life. In other versions, Isis took the form of a bird and flew over the earth seeking Osiris’s body. When she found it, she beat her wings so that they glowed with light and stirred up a wind; Osiris revived sufficiently to copulate with her, begetting their son, Horus.

The etchings that Whitman saw refer to a more vegetable version of the resurrection. Osiris was also a god of the crops, identified with the annual Nile flood and subsequent reappearance of the wheat. A number of reliefs have been preserved in which plants or trees grow from his dead body. In paintings and statues, Osiris is typically painted green. It was also the custom to make a figure of Osiris in grain on a mat placed inside a tomb. In the museum at Cairo there is an Osiris mummy which in ancient times was covered with linen and then kept damp so that corn actually grew on it.

“The … wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves.”

The Osiris etching that Whitman probably saw in the Astor
Library in 1855. The next year he wrote “Poem of Wonder at
The Resurrection of The Wheat.” The etching shows a
libation being poured over the dead Osiris; twenty-eight
stalks of grain sprout from the body.

Osiris is the “evergreen” principle in nature. Like the other well-known vegetation gods, he stands for what is broken, dismembered, and decayed yet returns to life with procreative power. His body is not just reassembled, it comes back green. With him we return to the mystery of things that increase as they perish—to the Tsimshian coppers cut apart at a chief’s funeral, the Kwakiutl coppers dismembered and riveted back together with increased value, Dionysos and the spirits that grow
because
the body is broken. And the gift as we first described it: a property that both perishes and increases. Osiris is
the mystery of compost: “It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.”

I have filled out the image of this god not because Whitman necessarily knew all of these details, but because I want to give some sense of the range of inherited meaning behind “the grass over graves.” Whitman begins with “I know that my body will decay,” and through a mysterious green chemistry he ends with the new shoots of grass.
And
he identifies that grass with his poetry:

The self becomes gifted when it identifies with a commerce of gifts and the gifted self is prolific. In nature the Osiris-force is the resurrection of the wheat; in a commerce of gifts it is the increase; in the gifted self it is creativity, and for a poet, in particular, it is original speech.

Whitman says that “the inmost secrets of art” sleep between sympathy and pride. We have so far addressed him primarily
by the first of these terms, sympathy, the receptive phase of his imagination. Objects approach and enter the permeable self, giving it identity—or, rather, a sequence of identities, for the old perishes as the new enters. Particular identity is dismembered, the particular body decays. But the self is not lost, new “sprouts take and accumulate.” With them we come to the second pole of Whitman’s art, the assertion of an active, autonomous, and idiosyncratic being. By “pride” Whitman means not haughtiness but something closer to self-confidence. Animals are proud in this sense, “so placid and self-contained …, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins …” The proud are those who accept their being as sufficient and justified. The proud man, in Whitman’s constantly repeated image, is he who will not remove his hat for any person, institution, or custom. Whitman himself used to wear his hat in the house.

Pride is not antithetical to sympathy, but it is selective. “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” counsels Whitman in the voice of pride. When pride is active, Whitman’s sympathy has only what the mystics call a “selective surrender.” Some things must be denied admission to the core of his being. Earlier we saw his senses surrender him to a lover; they reappear later as the agents of pride, and the result is different:

“To arms!”—this is an unusual note of quahaug-consciousness in “Song of Myself.” Whitman wants to harden himself. Why? Because at this moment in the poem sympathy has drawn him toward the dying and the empty. They enter his body: he is a convict handcuffed in prison, he is a child arrested for stealing:

This is dangerous. It is one thing to sympathize with the sick, but quite another to be infected with cholera. It is one thing to accept the perishing that leads to rebirth, and quite another to suffer the dead-end death in which the soul is lost. As D. H. Lawrence pointed out in his essay on Whitman, the leper hates his leprosy: to sympathize with him means to join in his hatred, not to identify with the disease. Here pride demands the assertion of the self against the outer object. Or better, it calls for a bestowal, an out-breathing, of the contents of the self, not a new infusion. The beggar holding out his hat has nothing to offer the self. It is
he
who needs to be filled—with food, matter, flux, a shot of the spirit. In short, the terms of the poem must change. Sympathy is insufficient. The next lines are unique in Whitman:

“Song of Myself” is not a highly organized poem, but to my mind it draws a certain coherence from a series of three “passions.” In the first of these (Section 5) the invited soul makes love to the poet. He comes to life. A long “in the world” section follows in which an essentially passive self suffers an escalating series of identities which culminate in the second passion (Sections 28 and 29—the touch that ends in the new sprouts). Another “in the world” section follows, this one closing with the beggar holding out his hat, and then the final passion (Section 38, just quoted). Whitman drops the sympathetic voice and takes up the voice of a rising spirit (Christ come from the grave or—in the first edition—as ascending dervish: “I rise extatic through all … / The whirling and whirling is elemental within me”).

He asserts an identity: “I resume the overstaid fraction” (“staid” in the sense of “fixed”—he speaks from the part of the self that says “I am eternal” rather than the part that accepts decay). He dissociates himself from “the mockers and insults.” He becomes a character, a personality, an individual capable of giving off energy and vitalizing others. The idleness and passivity that mark the first half of the poem fall away after this scene; he is active now, a teacher and a lover. He fathers children, he heals the sick and strengthens the weak (“Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you”). He doesn’t actually raise the dead, but he calls the moribund back from the lip of the grave:

Our enthusiast has exhaled at last. He who absorbed the proffered world for a thousand lines now gives it all away. “Anything I have I bestow.”

Whitman describes the being that gives itself away in a variety of images. It exhales a divine nimbus, it gives off auras and aromas (including “the scent of these armpits”), it is “electric” or “magnetic,” its eyes flash with a light more penetrating than the sun, it “jets” the “stuff” of love
*
—and finally, it speaks or sings or “utters poems.” This last, the poetry, is, of course, the emanation of the gifted self to which we shall attend here. But before doing so, I want to offer a brief biographical note on Whitman bestowing himself in love. The story will lead us back to our topic, the poetry as a gift, because in order to bestow his work, Whitman will set out to establish a gift-relationship with his reader, a love-relationship, really: “This [the poem] is the touch of my lips to yours … this is the murmur of yearning.” Some specifics from Whitman’s life will help us clarify the terms under which he courts his reader, and will anchor our analysis against some of our singer’s loftier claims.

The basic fact is that Whitman was a man disappointed in love. A close reading of the poems collected as
Children of Adam
and
Calamus
tells us quite a bit. The former group, intended to express “the amative love of women,” are not convincing. As in those churches in which sex is tolerated only as an instrument of procreation, it is a persistent quirk of Whitman’s imagination that heterosexual lovemaking always leads to babies. His women are always mothers. No matter how graphically Whitman describes “the clinch,” “the merge,” within a few lines out pops a child. This has the odd effect of making Whitman’s sexually explicit poems seem abstract: they have no emotional nuance, just biology. The women are not people you would know, nor anyone you feel Whitman knew.

But the
Calamus
poems are true love poems. They include all the feelings of love, not just attraction, excitement, and satisfaction, but disappointment, and even anger. They were written between 1856 and 1860 by a man who had extended his heart to someone and was waiting, in doubt, to see what might happen. His love was not returned, it seems—Whitman states it directly twice and nothing contravenes the impression:

We don’t know what went wrong, but Whitman clearly didn’t get what he wanted. One of the finest of the
Calamus
poems presents Whitman’s “leaves” in a new context, that of loneliness and love: