Telemoonfa’s "Song of Myself" Commentary

Dear Readers,

T.S. Elliot wrote, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, in the second paragraph, something profound about literary criticism. (I know I criticized literary criticism before in one of my blog posts, but mostly in that post I was referring to all the crazy theories I learned about last semester in my Graduate Literary Studies class. Remember the weird ideas of deconstruction and feminist theory and Marxist theory and stuff? Well, sometimes literary criticism like that can get me really frustrated and uncomfortable.) But here’s what T.S. Elliot had to says about literary criticism: “…we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it…”

With that defense of literary criticism in mind, I’m starting a project right now that I will most likely never finish. It’s a project I’ve thought about before. I’m going to write my own commentary on one of my favorite poems, Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman. I just love the poem and I love thinking about it and reading it slowly and reading it aloud and letting the poem call up images in my mind.

General Comments:

My first encounter with Song of Myself was probably in the spring of 2002, when I took an American Literature course at Eastern Arizona College with Dr. Marilyn Wilton. (I hope she doesn’t mind me using her name.) She was a marvelous teacher. I really liked her. I remember one day when we were studying Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan female American poet, she dressed up all in black in a prudish dress, kind of like a pilgrim. It was cool.) But she didn’t have us read the Whitman’s entire poem- it’s very long. She just had us read and analyze a few sections.

I love how American the poem is. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a patriot. I love America, and I’m even considering buying an American flag to put in my front yard, when I have a front yard. I don’t know. Anyway, Walt Whitman was American through and through. He also wrote O Captain, My Captain, a poem mourning the death and celebrating the life of Abraham Lincoln. I wish that more poets today would love their Presidents as much as Walt Whitman loved Abraham Lincoln. But then again, maybe I wish that modern Presidents were as worthy of love as Abraham Lincoln was.

Walt really seems to come straight from the soil of America. He lived on a farm most of his life. I think I’ve heard English teachers say that even though America was politically divided from Britain after the Revolutionary War, America was still dependent on Britain for intellectual and literary stuff, but people like Walt Whitman showed that America had its own literary geniuses, and had its own unique literary voice. Walt Whitman helped show that American people of letters weren’t just copycatting British authors. I’m not sure if all that’s true, (or even if it is true, I'm not sure if it really means anything or matters) but it sounds good.

I’ve decided to do a liberal humanist response to “Song of Myself.” That is, I’ll try to see how the text is universal, how it teaches lessons, gives advice, instructs us in the correct moral life, and gives us pleasure. I’ll also talk about everything I know and feel about it. So I’m sure I’ll say something like, “that’s an alliteration” and “that’s a beautiful image.” This is going to be a commentary from the mind and from the heart. I know that’s not a disciplined, academic response to the poem, but it will at least be honest. Maybe my thoughts will be more “reader-response” than liberal humanist. Hmmm...

I’ll try not to use any Cliff notes or Spark notes or Wikipedia stuff or anything like that, but maybe I will use some of that stuff.

I’ll also digress profusely.

Also, I’m copying and pasting the text of the poem from http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html with a slight modification. I’m numbering each stanza, just for reference purposes.

Without further ado...

Title

Song of Myself

Commentary on the title

Titles of poems are really important, you know, of course. “Song” makes it sound like what follows will be lyrical, something to be memorized and recited or sung- not just vulgar, unrefined words, not crude prose, not everyday language, but words carefully prepared and chosen and arranged by a gifted poet.

Song of Myself tells us that the speaker of the poem will be singing about himself or herself or itself. (It’s easy to assume that the speaker of the poem is Walt Whitman himself, but that’s a hasty assumption. But “speaker of the poem” is such a cumbersome phrase, so I’ll just write as if the “I” of the poem is Walt Whitman himself, although I’m aware that sometimes the “I” of Song of Myself refers to an entity bigger than one man.) The title may make it seem like Walt Whitman is self-obsessed, self-referential, self-centered, and in a way he is, and in another way he is not. I feel like this poem is a grand romantic examination of the poet’s own soul, but also a meditative commentary on all souls, and all life; it’s an invitation to everybody to practice introspection. It’s like Whitman is looking honestly into himself to see what also must be true in other human beings. Whitman might be thinking that the deepest, private, unarticulated feeling he finds in himself is also the deepest private, unarticulated feeling in you.

I didn’t make that last idea up completely by myself. I heard it from somewhere but I can’t remember where.

Song of Myself is simultaneously about Walt himself, and about all of humanity.

What I’m trying to say is that Song of Myself isn’t a cryptic set symbols only legible and understandable to the poet himself. No, this poem is an attempt at communication with other people. It was published in a book and sent out there into the world for other people, perfect strangers, to read.

How successful is Song of Myself in its communication? That’s hard to say. I suppose to answer that question, we should think about the poem’s amount of particularity and universality. If it’s too particular, if the poem only makes sense and has meaning for Whitman himself, then it has failed in communication. If it’s too universal, Song of Myself might not apply to anybody specifically enough, and it might lose its potential for real-world application, and it might not have good imagery- it might be swamped with abstract principles and cloudy ideas.

In literature there is always the balance between particularity and universality. You could probably argue that every text is in some way both particular and universal, but of course some texts are more particular or universal than others. People who are familiar with life in the United States in the mid-1800s might best understand Song of Myself. But the poem is universal enough that it has withstood the test of time, to use a cliché, so that modern readers can read it and love it and get good stuff out of it.

First Stanza

1. I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

2. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

3. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

4. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.

Commentary on the First Stanza

About the line, “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”: I recently watched a video of a dramatization of Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in my Women Writers and Feminist Theory class. It really was a profound feminist essay that Ms. Woolf wrote. She asks the questions, What if Shakespeare had a sister, who was just as talented as the Bard? What would have happened to her? Well, since she was a woman in England in the 1500s and 1600s, she would not have been educated, and she would not have been welcomed into the theatre world as William Shakespeare was- in short, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister would have dwindled in obscurity, and never really been allowed by society to make her way into the world of letters.

Woolf continues to say that women writers have written under enormous pressure to get their voices heard, and that slowly more and more female authors were getting published and being encouraged to write, but still, the Hall of Respectable Literature was built, owned, and maintained by men. Woolf’s main point was that a woman needs basically a few things to become a writer: money, free time, and a private room.

How is Woolf’s essay related to Whitman’s poem? Both the poem and the essay beautifully express that in order to create art, and in order to comprehend and experience life in its depth and glory, one needs free time. This should not be surprising to us. Remember that all great poems are written in a poet’s free time- time when poets are poets, not “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” (Joshua 9:21)

In order to let poets have their free time and space, sometimes I think that government-funded art is a great idea. (And, in fact, government-funded art is sort of mentioned in the U.S. Constitution: Here it is in Article 1 section 8: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;” (I wonder what “useful arts” means. Maybe the Framers did not have interpretive dance in mind when they wrote that line of the Constitution. In any case, I’m digressing.) Other times I think some grants for the arts are dumb, and should not be funded by tax-payers.

The point is, Walt Whitman wrote Song of Myself in his free time, when he wasn’t working. Thus we see that it’s so important just to have time alone, away from the toils and labors of the workday, to write poetry, to observe life and see life and nature and the world with clear eyes.

When I read “my tongue” in line 6, I am very conscious of my own tongue, I can feel it sitting there in my mouth, not completely comfortable. It's kind of like how when you think about your fingers, instead of taking them for granted, you might think it’s strange to see them in the position they’re in. Remember the Cake lyrics, “When you sleep, where do your fingers go?” Well, I ask you now, where is your tongue now? What position is it in? Is it touching the backs of your teeth? Do you feel the saliva your tongue is resting in? Does your tongue move, even if slightly, while you breathe? The tongue is a funny body part, isn't it? It nevers seems to be completely still or relaxed to me, especially when I think about it.

Do you feel weird or uncomfortable thinking about your tongue so much?

By the way, for all you aspiring thespians out there, it’s that type of awareness of one's body- the type of self awareness that Walt Whitman is tapping into- that actors should have. It should always be in the actor’s mind: “Where are my fingers? Where are my shoulders? Where are my feet? Where are my hips? What do I look like to the audience?” Whether an actor’s self-awareness while acting is a conscious thing or an internalized, almost subconscious thing is up for debate… of course you can’t get too hung up on how you look to the audience, sometimes that can be paralyzing…

...but I remember that when I wrestled the best, it was like I was having a lucid dream. I was aware of where my body was at all times- nuances in weight shift, etc. Wrestling was very sensual, and I was in complete, conscious control. Wrestling, like acting, is not a letting loose of emotion, or a mad display of all your skills at once- wrestling and acting are very calculated, pre-meditated things. Of course intuition and hocus-pocus is involved, but maybe 5% of the wrestling and acting is magic. The other 95% is conscious effort and deliberate choice making.

Maybe to wrestling and acting I can add writing poetry- or meditating. Walt Whitman is very aware of himself, aware of his body, his weight in the world- the small dent that he makes in the gravitational field, his absolutely true stature in relation to the absolutely true world- his place among God’s creations.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same

"form'd from this soil" reminds me of Adam being formed from the dust, and it also reminds me of the Native American idea of humans being formed by the Great Spirit from the red clay and such. But Walt was also “born here of parents” so of course he was born of a woman, but maybe Walt is trying to convey the sense that he is both Adam, the first man journeying on the Earth, and also an obscure man, coming from a real family tree, among all the billions of people on the Earth, who also all have their own family trees.

I love that line, “in perfect health.” The soul who is writing the poem is not dreaming, or crazy- he’s very aware of where he is and what he is doing. It’s like he’s having a moment of clarity, or feeling the Spirit. It almost sounds like he’s signing a contract, like, “Yes, I am 37 years old and I am of sound mind. I am qualified to be a witness, and I will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

Creeds and schools in abeyance

I love that line. Abeyance is an old word that means “stopped.” Remember that Walt Whitman is outside as he writes/thinks/speaks his poem; he is outside, lying on the ground, looking at the grass. He is not is church, and he is not in school. He’s purposefully temporarily disregarding what he has learned in school and church, in order to meditate more perfectly. (Some would argue that completely disregarding what society has taught you is an impossible task, of course. Perhaps the ghosts of church and school are still screaming in Walt's mind, even as he claims to put those institutions in abeyance.)

Now, Walt is definitely not saying that people should never go to church or school, but he’s saying that there comes a time when we need to get away from those buildings and people and books and be alone on purpose- be alone on purpose… be alone on purpose in an attempt to achieve clarity of mind and purity of soul.

By the way, the theme and mood of this poem, and especially that line, “creeds and schools in abeyance” reminds me of another one of my favorite Walt Whitman poems, When I Heard the Learned Astronomer. In that poem, the speaker of the poem leaves a lecture hall where an astronomer is lecturing about astronomy, and he walks out into the night alone, and looks up at the stars, in reverence.

Well, there is more I could write, and there is more I could think about in response to the poem- the poem is gargantuan- but, as I heard from somewhere, (but I can't remember where. I tried googling it but it wouldn't google) "writing is never really finished, but at some point it needs to get published."

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa