This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The rim, the sediment

T H E R I M , T H E S E D I M E N T J7 An undertow of whir immersed in words. The rim, the sediment In its first fire Whitman's verse was magnificently tropic, a crisp, biodegradable composition of the States (not yet "United" but cosmically chaotic) into a demonized poetic topos; a body of work that might have as its most fitting epigraph not the overconfident "Song of the Open Road" singled out by D. H. Lawrence, but "This Compost." Of the major poems, only "I Sing the Body Electric," "Song of Myself," and "The Sleepers" precede it. The grand collection of shorter gems and "sparkles from the wheel" in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass are beach stones that roar and scrape under the immense tidal pressure of some two dozen poems written by 1860.* The poise of Whitman's vitality wasderived from that fluid terror of Being that courses unhindered through animal life. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. Whitman the poet falls in love with the sweetness of such corruption, celebrating its fatal appeal in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": * In addition to those listed above, I would single out "AWoman Waits for Me," "Spontaneous Me," "On the Beach at Night Alone," "Song of the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Song of the Answerer," "Starting from Paumanok," "To the Garden of the World," "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," "Our Old Feuillage," "Out of the Cradle EndlesslyRocking ," and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life." j8 T H I S C O M P O S T Whereto answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death, And again death, death, death, death, Hissing melodious neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart, But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, Death, death, death, death, death. This is on no account the consolation provided by Keats'snightingale, "half in love with easeful death," but an implacablyalien yet intimate insistence. The repetition of the word "death" establishes by rhythmic habitation an enlarged premonition. This word, this "strong and delicious word," "the word up from the waves," "the key" of a "thousand responsive songs at random," resounds in the mockingbird's lament for its lost mate. The mockingbird, embraced by Whitman as "my dusky demon and brother," is an erotic presence commensurate with the sexual testament of the poems "Spontaneous Me" and "AWomanWaits for Me." The keynote in these poems is unambiguously the "husky pantings through clinch'd teeth" (of "Not Heaving from my Ribb'd Breast Only"), and here the physical source of Whitman's lifelong emission of poetic lines as "Beautiful dripping fragments" is confirmed. The taste for death develops as a sexual exultation. Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap, Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts of love, bellies press'd and glued together with love . . . Whitman's own sexual identity is consistently that of the "limpid liquid within the young man," and it's here if anywhere that the demonic character of his romance with corruption has a truly pioneer quality. Whitman's sexual body is the dark spot on his verse, which no America short of his fantastic vistas of interracial and multisexual mingling will ever consentingly include.* The sea's whispered word * The "homosocial" text evident in Whitman's verse has attracted much commentary, explicitly sanctioning the supposition of the poet's homosexuality. But the preoccupation with rendering Whitman gaybegins to sound asprudentially fixated on its own terms as the former tendency to claim him as a heterosexual hero. The axis of distinction deserves to be differently drawn, possibly even in the terms advanced by his friends, who distinguished T H...