Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman

The Voluptuous Earth and the Fall of the Redwood Tree: Whitman’s Personifications of Nature

The Voluptuous Earth and the Fall of the Redwood Tree Whitman’s Personifications of Nature m. jimmie killingsworth
The emergence of studies in “environmental rhetoric” and “ecocriticism” in the wake of environmentalist politics creates new possibilities for reading Whitman’s poems. In the light of international ecopolitics, ecofeminism , the environmental justice movement, and the recent protests in the United States against “globalization,” many nature poems seem to lose their innocence and acquire a cultural and political edginess.1 Emerson, Thoreau, and the flock of nature writers who emerged from the tradition these two writers began have rightly received the greatest attention in ecocriticism focusing on nineteenth-century American literature, but a new project in ecopoetics — the aim of which is to understand the myths and metaphors by which human beings identify their own purposes with the creatures and processes of nature — might well turn to Whitman.2 No other writer before or after Whitman experimented so widely and warmly with the use of personification, a key trope of identity that since ancient times has taught people to think of the earth as a mother, a lover, and an analog of the human body. Whitman pushed the limits of this trope, as he did with so many others, especially in the energetic performances that filled the first three editions of Leaves of Grass. His infamous poetry of the body was not confined to contemplating physical beauty in human bodies alone but encompassed whole landscapes of life, as in these famous lines from “Song of Myself”: Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset — earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow’d earth — rich apple-blossom’d earth! Smile, for your lover comes. (LG 49) An ecocritical perspective asks us to question our own appreciation of such lines. The aesthetic value of the imagery is beyond question, in my view — the earth with cool breath and elbows, adorned in apple blossoms — as is the humor of the speaker’s winkingly self-ironic hyperbole. But what about the political implications of personifying the earth as the voluptuous female lover of the male poet? After Annette Kolodny’s ecofeminist critiques of the pioneering mentality that treats the land as a woman’s body to be possessed and dominated, we may only dare to smile at Whitman’s machismo.3 As the linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have suggested, we not only love by our metaphors, we also live by them.4 How does seeing nature as mother or mistress, or in any way seeing ourselves reflected in the environment, affect our conception of the human relation to nature? Such questions make even the innocent old clichés of personification seem suspicious, much less the wild troping of our pioneering poet. And yet the science and nature writers who have been most influential in twentieth-century political ecology have employed a personifying rhetoric . Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, the “mother text” of contemporary environmentalism, couches its most fervent appeals in personi fications reminiscent of Whitman’s best poems, conceptualizing the earth in terms of the human body. The “health of the landscape,” in her words, sustains our own bodies in health; when the land grows sick, human health must decline as well. Surveying the damage from pesticides and industrial pollution, Carson laments the “scars of dead vegetation” and the “weeping appearance” of afflicted trees.5 Each element of her trope, the earth’s body and the human body, informs the other. Just as the earth experiences health and illness, she says, “[t]here is also an ecology of the world within our own bodies”— the cycles and chemical interrelations by which we live and die.6 A precedent for Carson’s wide-ranging personifications appears in Aldo Leopold’s midcentury essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which urges readers to abandon the short-term thinking of cattlemen who exterminate wolves to protect herds and thereby increase Whitman’s Personifications of Nature 15 deer populations, only to ultimately unbalance the ecology of the land, leaving too many deer. The deer then destroy their...