Whitman's Instructions

Walt Whitman, preeminent American poet, finds a lot to love about nature in his seminal Leaves of Grass. We get a sort of pastoral beauty in descriptions of "the tinge [awakening] over the willow tree and the mulberry tree/the he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she/birds sit in their nests/the young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs" etc. This motif of birth up from the earth for all beings is important and implemented by the poet to reiterate the incorruptible power of nature. Whitman wonders how the land is not poisoned entirely, but recognizes its resilience. This rings especially true today when we are faced with toxically destructive elements invading from every corner of the globe, in our oceans, in the sky, seemingly everywhere and yet nature sallies on.

Whitman, however, remains oftentimes deliriously optimistic. He states that "the winds are really not infectious...[and as] I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease." The world is a re-birth mechanism, it will not be sullied by our bad intentions. It this these intentions, I believe, that evoke Whitman's lamentation that "I am terrified at the Earth..with such endless successions of diseased corpses." Here is a world where everything dies, especially when humans expedite the process. We must recognize instead a utopian "unseen moral essence" that goads us subliminally. We must follow this guiding natural way, instead of mutilating the pastoral landscape with "the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers' axes." We must protect our investment, so to speak.

I agree wholeheartedly with Whitman that we need to "build a grander future." Though, I'm not sure, in his epoch, or in ours, we have really made it. The last stanza seems a bit too hopeful for me. Call me cynical but I don't think that in 1874, there was any kind of "genius...clearing the ground for...the true America." In fact, in the time since elapsed, we have seen a bit of the opposite. Whitman's intentions are good and maybe its my proclivity for the harsher ramifications of toxic discourse but I didn't find the ending of this excerpt all that believable. We are not quite "proportionate to Nature", but at least, I suppose, we are trying.