The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [128]
H S and Eva Westcott married.
Whitman accompanied Harry and his bride to the civil ceremony, consenting in the end to be the father again, the father who gives the boy away, not the lover who may keep him.
The Stafford farm offered Whitman something besides Harry and the opportunity to play grandfather to a family. Not far from the house there was a woods, a pond, and a stream called Timber Creek. Spring, summer, and fall, sometimes with the local farm boys but often alone, Whitman would go down to the water. He would drag along a portable chair and sit beneath a large black oak (“exhaling aroma”), or sunbathe naked (except for his hat—he kept his hat on). He carried pencil and paper and took notes on the trees, the swarms of bumblebees, the song of the locust (“like a brass disk whirling”), the hermit thrush, the quail, cedar apples, a spring that rose from beneath a willow—“gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly … (if one could only translate it)”—and the pond itself with its calamus leaves, water snakes, and birds (“the circle—gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel”).
Whitman returned to the self of his first song at Timber Creek. Hobbling down the farm lane early in the morning, he would pause by the tall, yellow-flowered mulleins to examine their woolly stems and the light-reflecting facets of the leaf: “Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently re-turn’d together.” He resumed that participatory sensuality in which “subject” and “object” dissolve to be replaced by a presence, an “invisible physician” he calls it now, whose medicine “neither chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will give the least explanation.” He wanted to be healed. “Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine?”he asks the sky. “And dost Thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly upon me?”
As had been the case for the young Whitman, it was the trees that held this old man’s medicine. A yellow poplar stood near the creek, four feet thick at the butt and ninety feet high. “How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming … How it rebukes, by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man …” The trees, like the animals, do not complain of lost love or unsatisfied desire. They celebrate themselves. Whitman began to fantasize about dryads and dream of trees speaking to him. “One does not wonder at the old story fables … of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength of them—strength …”
Whitman hit upon the idea of exercising his limbs by bending young trees (“my natural gymnasia,” he called them). The first day he spent an hour pushing and pulling an oak sapling, thick as a man’s wrist and twelve feet high. “After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine.” He began to sing: “I launch forth in my vocalism; shout declamatory pieces, sentiments, sorrow, anger, &c, from the stock poets or plays—inflate my lungs and sing the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs …” All during the summer of 1876 he wrestled with the trees.
Whitman’s nursing during the war had opened him to love. It changed his life. We find no relationships before the war like those he later established with Doyle or with Stafford: intense, articulated, and long-lasting. And yet, so opened he was also wounded. Something needing cure appeared in his blood. “To touch my person