70 PA RT O N E
Sea,” she wrote, but “just the weight of God.” She ’d have backed “This head
more than churches,” but the rest was more than she needed to know.
Another profane passage mixing spirit into earthliness would have gotten
Whitman tarred and feathered by the Puritan fathers:
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread
of my own body, or any part of it...
Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
You my rich blood! Your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded
duplicate eggs! It shall be you!
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!A wavelike surge intoning “you!” and “You” binds “worship” into his own
body. So do the unexpected images. With Adam’s birthright, Whitman loved
naming country things from a Long Island landscape he knew well—“colter” a
prong sending the plow-blade into the “tilth” or tilled earth, sweet-flag’s root, a
snipe ’s long beak, duplicate eggs—and he wanted their sexual energy too. His
litany of worship comes to a flagrant close:
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my
winding paths, it shall be you!It ’s a great deal more than Robinson Jeffers meant, guarding nature ’s whole-
ness: “Love that, not man / Apart from that.”
“I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,” “Song of My-
self ” lets us know. When Longfellow and Whittier were setting the tone in
1855, Walt ’s carnal openness took nerve, just as his language did. A sunrise
sends him over the top:
To behold the day-break!...
Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising
freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.Like daylight heaving up, his verbs are gamboling, freshly exuding, scooting
obliquely. No one before or since has seen or said things this way:
Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.“Something I cannot see,” mystical though he can speak it: bare sunrise, the
day’s orange orgasm.