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to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.” It is the sadness of this life that Whitman could not cure himself with a human love. A baffled animal, he turned back to his trees in the end. But as he confides to us before he tells his tale of Timber Creek, “after you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains …” Beyond the sadness of this life lies its genius, that Whitman was able to find the give-and-take to heal him, to find a green-force to overcome the blood’s decay. He never married his unlettered boy, but he accepted virtue from an even more unlettered nature and gave it speech.

* In the trajectory of Whitman’s life one can discern a tendency toward a more disincarnate spirituality. As an old man he wrote that Leaves of Grass was a collection of songs of the body and that he had thought of writing a second book to indicate that “the unseen Soul govern[s] absolutely at last.” And yet, he says, “It is beyond my powers,” adding that “the physical and the sensuous … retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely releas’d …”

* When Whitman later tried to raise money for his work in the Civil War hospitals, a friend wrote to him from Boston: “There is a prejudice against you here among the ‘fine’ ladies and gentlemen of the transcendental School. It is believed that you are not ashamed of your reproductive organs and, somehow, it would seem to be the result of their logic—that eunuchs only are fit for nurses.”

* The quahaug is the same one that appeared in the fantasy of the hungry soul: “Now do I talk of mine and his?—Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?”

* The poem from which these lines are taken is the one about which D. H. Lawrence made his perceptive comment, “Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life.” The remark is often quoted without its context so as to imply that Whitman is only a poet of death. But the context is the same as the one I am setting up here. “… Of the end of life,” says Lawrence, and he adds, “But we have all got to die, and disintegrate. We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live … Something else will come. ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.’”

* To speak of procreation as a bestowal, Whitman is forced to abandon his habitual evenhandedness toward the sexes. The male self ejaculates sperm, the female gives birth to babies.

* There are other “speech centers” in the self besides what Whitman is calling the soul. The intellect can speak—it can describe the known world, it can draw logical conclusions. But it cannot create speech for the mute. It is a gesture of the wakened soul to offer articulation to the speechless content of the self. “The talkers … talking the talk of the beginning and the end” cannot do it; only soul, imagination, muse, genius can do it.

* When I speak of celebration, I do not mean that all our art must be a cheery affirmation. To utter sorrow and loss is also a responsive speech, and a form of celebration. I use the term broadly, of course, as when we speak of “celebrating” the anniversary of someone’s death. “Sadness, in order to sing, / Will have to drink black water,” says the Spanish poet José Luis Hidalgo. No one welcomes the black water of grief, but it too, when it comes, may be accepted and articulated. Spoken sorrow— or despair, or longing—descries the shape of the lost. We keep alive through speech the spirit of what we do not have; we survive, spiritually, by uttering the names of the dead and the names of what we need but cannot find. (There is little of this in Whitman, by the way. Only in Calamus and in some of the old-age poems do we feel him trying to name what he could not find. He is primarily a poet of praise, “I keep no account with lamentation,” he wrote early on. By that same token, however, some of his sorrow remained mute and some of his intensity never came to life).

† In an account of a center serving the Jewish elderly in California,