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

ADAMIC WALT WHITMAN 69

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs

and of the father-stuff,

And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

One cycle arcs all the way from “long dumb voices” to “balls of dung,” from
suffering humanity to nature persisting. In staggered ranks as they enter, genera-
tion by generation, Whitman unscrolls a cosmos of sundry voices by phasing
them: “Through me many... voices,” then “Voices of... and of,” then “And
of,” then “Of,” then simply “Fog... beetles.” Everything interdepends—to
use a verb coined during his prime.
Walt speaks for the despised and rejected, like Isaiah, for the poor and meek,
like Jesus. “I give the sign of democracy,” says he, and the lingo proves this,
blending high speech with low, philosophic “cycles of... accretion” with Ameri-
can slang, “down upon.” The human condition melds with nature: prisoners
and slaves phase into fog, the diseased and despairing into beetles. Those mean
specimens, scarab beetles “rolling balls of dung,” were sacred symbols of re-
newal in ancient Egypt. Everywhere they feed on dung, lay their eggs in it, and
recycle its nutrients underground thus cleansing the land.
Whitman felt right and jaunty in the world:
I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains,
esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,

and his own voice felt right with nature:

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air.

A “spear of summer grass” grafts right onto “My tongue,” giving it sexual
and botanic thrust. Likewise “The sound of the belch’d words of my voice
loos’d to the eddies of the wind” pleased him immensely, made him one with
the elements.
This much was good, but not enough. Whitman’s song of himself celebrates
spirit along with flesh, especially his own flesh:

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch

or am touch’d from,

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

Imagine Emily Dickinson reading this in Amherst at twenty-five, and trying
her own bold voice: “The Brain—is wider than the Sky” and “deeper than the