The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [111]
“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:
To anyone dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of
the door, …
I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless
will,
O despairer, here is my neck,
By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole
weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath …
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