Gloss on “Song of Myself”

I picked this video because the old woman in it embodies both the freedom of “grass” and the freedom of “song” as Whitman communicates both in his poem:

 

 

Like this woman — leaves of grass are unselfconscious, are powerless, defenseless, they impart a feeling of carelessness for their condition of interdependency with their surrounding environment, and with what is, whatever happens to be. The activity of grass, like the activity of this woman on the doorstep of death, is surrender, letting go. Her dying — like grass in Whitman’s poem — is a “flag” (a symbol) for undying life.

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Below are some thoughts on “song” — or on “the music of poetry” – from T.S. Eliot which help us understand Whitman’s sense of “song” as it gives of itself in his poem “Song of Myself” —

… non-sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it. [When] we enjoy…the music [or song] of poetry, which is of a high order, and we enjoy the feeling of irresponsibility towards the sense.

…Employing this figure, I may say that the great poet should not only perceive and distinguish more clearly than other men, the colours or sounds within the range of ordinary vision or hearing; he should perceive vibrations beyond the range of ordinary men, and be able to make men see and hear more at each end than they could ever see without his help. … It is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted.…

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Mouths in this poem — “Notes on Longing” — a poem I saw postered on the subway serve two functions: mouths serve the basic biological  function of eating, on the one hand; and mouths serve the more extraordinary aesthetic-artistic function of “singing,” on the other hand– even if the latter function in this poem is annulled, suppressed. Tina Chang’s poem — like Whitman’s poem — is a song: the word “notes” of her title denotes music “notes on longing,” precisely the longing to sing of her last line, which implies that singing is a primordial activity that has been suppressed.

The poet T.S. Eliot once argued that “lips only sing when they cannot kiss,” and that “it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing.”  Whitman sings.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.
I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
..I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

…

I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)
I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.
I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.
A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.
I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
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Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Whitman names his poem a “song.”  His poem is, according to his own assertion, a song of himself.  It is both a song about himself and a song understood as the very embodiment of what understood to be his most essential identity, his highest self.  There is something in the essential nature of song — something that is not of the essential nature of the activities of speaking or of talking or of conversing or of philosophizing — that Whitman understood as equal, more or less, to his identity, his self.

In other words, he understood himself to, in some sense, BE a song — as opposed to a speech or an essay or an article; and he understood his song to be ABOUT who he is: namely an experience of life happening, and moreover an experience of life understood as happening to our experience as it happened to his experience. His experience –expressed as “song” — is what Whitman imagines to be “as grass.”  More specifically, his poem “Song of Myself” exists in a collection called “Leaves of Grass” and the very core-life of his “song” effectively simulates the very core-life of “grass” as understood the life of grass, as according to the much-quoted biblical phrase in the Bible’s Book of Isaiah: “all flesh is as grass,” as quoted by the evangelist Peter in his First Epistle:

All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls.

Grass in Whitman’s “song” communicates like this:

 

 

In ways that any form of speech cannot, Whitman’s song communicates immediacy, spontaneity, the here-and-now: his song is an event, it is the unfolding of a moment.  His “song” is about a momentary experience and the momentary experience is his “song.”

Singing is not speech or speaking. How are they different? Singing is not talking, or conversing. How are they different? They are the same inasmuch as both are species of the auditory. Both are sounds or noises meant to be heard.  Nevertheless, we hear songs differently. Consciously and unconsciously they songs and singing produce effects in us that are different than the effects that speaking, or talking or conversing or    any prose form of speech produce in us.

 

Songs are meant to be sung.

 

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