Ol' Number 10

10

Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill'd game,
Falling asleep on the gather'd leaves with my dog and gun by my
         side.

The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and
         scud,
My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from
         the deck.

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck'd my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good
         time;
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
         the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly
         smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick
         blankets hanging from their shoulders,
On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his
         luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his
         bride by the hand,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight
         locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to
         her feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and
         weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd
         feet,
And gave him a room that enter'd from my own, and gave him
         some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd
         north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner.

After beginning my Transcendental experience with Emerson, it has been a relief to read Whitman's spare and powerful verse. While his overt attempts to characterize himself as "one of the roughs" falls a bit flat, his enthusiasm is irresistible. In section 10 of "Song of Myself," reproduced above from the Whitman Archive, his language is particularly vivid. I don't know if Whitman ever did hunt "Alone far in the wilds and mountains" with a "dog and gun by [his] side," but I don't much care if he hasn't . . . neither have I. Whitman seems really to have seen  "boatmen and clam-diggers," "the trapper in the open air" and his "red girl." They were real and, according to the tenets of the Transcendentalist project, they were not separate from him. If anyone bent at the prow of a Yankee clipper or "shout[ed] joyously from the deck," then so did Whitman and so, through him, have I.

In his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman has this to say about style:

The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. . . . What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.

It is one of the few really coherent things he says in the preface (a rambling, nearly unreadable effort not included in later editions of the book), and it neatly summarizes my own response to his work. His lines are unadorned, like the bare wood of an axe handle. This directness makes his images all the more vivid. I've never dug clams out of the sand, sat on the beach and, with my friends, eaten chowder that we made ourselves from our fresh catch, but I've had analogous experiences of my own. Whitman doesn't need to embellish his lines with precious descriptions of the aroma from the cook-pot or the white grains of sand flecking the sun-browned knees of the girl across the circle from him. His declaration, "You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle" compels me to share in the experience by pressing my own lived experience into service.

In his essay "The Poet," Emerson declares that "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung." Whitman sings himself, and in doing so, deliberately fills this order.