Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? The past and present wilt-I have fill’d them, emptied them,Īnd proceed to fill my next fold of the future. The ending of Song of Myself I consider to be one of the greatest achievements in American Literature, an unfettered acceptance of life and death as ever I have read.ĭo I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. But there are poignant passages of respite contained within for me, where my fullness of understanding is complete and those passages of clarity bring light to the whole of it. Song of Myself is a daunting poem, hard to wade through and unpack because of its ferocity. Full of Life, Now is Whitman’s call to worship and Song of Myself his parables and benediction. Whitman’s poems and particularly Song of Myself have always felt to me like his gospel, his new testament. Their creativity takes its own trajectory once it comes into the world. The upshot of what I was trying to say is simply this: All creative acts are in of themselves a type of eternal life and resurrection for their creator. Maybe the trick to discussing eternity is brevity? In rereading, it felt ponderous and overbearing.
I admit that I deleted my first commentary on this blog post. Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems,įancying how happy you (are), if I could be with you,īe it, as if I were with you. When you read these, I, that was visible, am become
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States, Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) FULL OF LIFE, NOW. Join 457 other subscribers Search for: Archives
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