72 PA RT O N E
Except for “Lord” and “God,” “Song of Myself ” could be thrilling at nature ’s
force. What does Whitman sound like in Hebrew? “Ezekiel,” says his Israeli
translator.
Sometimes he overdid his strength—“Who goes there? hankering, gross,
mystical, nude; / How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?”—leaving
himself open to parody, such as Ezra Pound ’s “Whitman Is the Voice of One
Who Saith”:
Lo, behold, I eat water melons. When I eat water melons the world eats
water melons through me.
When the world eats water melons,
I partake of the world ’s water melons.Yet Whitman at his nerviest outstrips his parodists, as “Song of Myself ” closes:
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.Gab or yawp or Long Island shaman, his words are tied in one with nature ’s
rhythms:
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.The last scud of wind-driven mist, vague shadowed wilds, vapor and dusk, sig-
nal a passing away, but even that surges with outlandish exuberance—nature ’s
and his own:
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.Then he returns to the soil and grass of section one:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.Finally his rolling rhythm carries Whitman’s song from himself to ourselves:
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.And yes, he does still wait for us, where humankind melds with the earth.
A glimpse at Walt Whitman’s life shows the same motives that drove his
poetry. Decades after its publication, he kept on growing Leaves of Grass, adding
and revising through eight more editions until the year he died. Put in “American