"The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme"
American Samizdat: Walt Whitman's America
We come now to the final five days. One doesn’t see the world turn on its axis, doesn’t feel it, but it does. Without our awareness of its happening, the earth’s orientation toward the universe is changed, instant by instant, when all seemed, in illusory sameness, unchanging. Come Tuesday night, come Monday morning, will the good news be that the United States is rescued, a broken nation, to struggle on in repair? Or will we learn that never in history did a people given so much, inheritors of a national fortune so great, beyond compare, so take it for granted and throw it all away?
I will take these days, to mark them in something that feels like usefulness, to publish over the next three of them three very different, shorter pieces, to note the occasion in history. On Monday, I’ll be on Notes, as I often am — you’ll find me there. Tuesday, having already voted, like you, I’ll wait.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Walt Whitman’s grand ambition in early, youthful obscurity was to make of himself America’s poet. Over a lifetime of writing and at first self-publishing his career opus, Leaves of Grass, a lifetime during which, in middle-age, Whitman served as a Union nurse during the Civil War (from which he wrote Drum Taps, later included in the ever-expanding Leaves), he did make himself America’s poet. He remains so.
In his1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman wrote of
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future.
He spoke directly to future Americans.
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
He imagined our consideration of him, as his of us.
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near to me,
Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)
He asked the essential question of those of his time and those of American time to come.
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me.
He sought to reassure.
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
He tried to lead us to recognize something.
We understand then do we not?
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?
Whitman, the poet of the page, conjured his spirit for us.
Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;
He conjured the varied spirits of America, in its places and people.
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
This great generous, loving human and poetic spirit, of a still young America, seeking, living, and writing to embrace us all – where do we find its like today?
Or are we less than Whitman dreamed us to be?
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Thank you for sharing Whitman. Where do we find it’s like today? Amanda Gorman, perhaps.
Jay, this could not be more timely. May America find Whitman under its collective bootheels on election day.