Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

ADAMIC WALT WHITMAN 71

Whitman was never tarred and feathered, but in Washington, having tended
gently to Civil War wounded from both sides, his “indecent” book got him
dismissed from a government job. The Secretary of the Interior didn’t have
far to look in Leaves of Grass: “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from
your throat,” Walt asks his soul, “Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd
voice.” Yet that music alone, tuning “lull” with “hum” between l’s and v’s,
should have absolved him.
One summer morning “you settled your head athwart my hips,” he goes on
to his soul-mate, “And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your
tongue to my bare-stript heart.” Brazenness then finds a biblical cadence, not
debasing but sanctifying earth:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass

all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women

my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein

and poke-weed.

We ’ve felt this pulse before, shaping a new world in Genesis:

And the earth was without form and void;

and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The wonder is, without meter or rhyme we ’re borne by natural breath lines
through a chain of being from divine peace to human love and down through
“kelson,” for a ship’s keel, to “brown ants,” “mossy scabs,” and commonplace
“elder, mullein and poke-weed”—poke-weed!
“He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization, which are ap-
parently entirely contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life,” said—of
all people—Franz Kafka, long before most of Whitman’s compatriots had seen
as much. “I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature.”
Contradiction came handily to Whitman. While rejecting “bibles, and all the
creeds,” he still drew from the prophets and Psalms. Listen to Psalm 104:

The earth shall tremble at the look of him: if he do but touch the hills,

they shall smoke.

I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will praise my God while I have

my being.