[W. Harrison].
"Walt Whitman's
November Boughs."
Critic [New York] n.s. 11
(19 January 1889), 25.
Ordinarily, one associates 'November boughs' with flown birds, vanished
scents, tattered foliage, skies of steel. Nature like a Greek athlete is
stripped for the winter wrestle. Already there is a shimmer of frozen
rivers in the distance, a ripple of soft reverberations from vanished
summer echoing in memory only -even a prophecy of the boreal flare in
the northern sky. The sap is down: the skeleton arms are up: all the
infinite articulations of tree and leaf, the lovely geometries of
interlacing branches, bare to the quick: everything is ready for the
long, long sleep.
Is this true of Walt Whitman's book? In a sense; it is a preparation
for the long sleep - a touching, ave et vale; apparently the author's
greeting and salutation and - good bye. But in another sense it might
just as well have been christened 'May-blossoms' or 'Leafy June,' or
anything else suggestive of richness, luxuriance, juice and bloom, for
all are there in springtime abundance, even a group of new poems -
'Sands at Seventy,' - delectably sandwiched between the Introduction and
'Our Eminent Visitors' (republished from The Critic). Sap at seventy is
seldom so affluent as it is in this striking volume, binding up the
life-long thoughts of a revolutionist in verse, an evolutionist in
belief; and it runs up and along these 'November boughs' with a great
urge and palpitation that expands and freights them to bursting. One can
fancy them all over tingling with red blood to their pith. Themistocles
drank bull's blood and then died of it as a poison. Here there is no
thought of poison or death except as the horizon of all things, the
garde-fou that like a banister keeps men from tumbling over into
annihilation. Succulence, marrow, poetic feeling course through the book
exultantly.
All the author's essential things are here: beliefs, faiths, theories,
practices; monologuing, apologuing; strong-hearted democracy;
camaraderie and bonhomie; interspersed with wonderfully graphic tableaux
of memoranda (if one may so speak) gathered and grouped from his
hospital and Indian Bureau memories. So the prophets spake: in brief
puffs and pulsations like these: Orphic utterances that expire in a sigh
or a hexameter: moods of norn and sibyl run into speech as molten glass
is run into forms; short, quick, pregnant flashes of reminiscence that
expand into a picture or a pictured paragraph without a moment's
hesitation. The most remarkable part of the book is its first
heart-beat: 'A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads,' which one might
number as strophe a in a Greek ode, all the other essays and fragments
being epodes, after-songs, echoes of the initial trumpet-blast. In this
preface the author reaffirms himself, his poetic position, his heresies,
his art theory, his democratic dreams: he stands or falls by Leaves of
Grass, and he denounces with a Shakspeare-like malediction all who would
disturb the 'bones' of his work or who would fig-leaf or expurgate it.
Whether his theory of verse-form be true or false, it finds its
justification in the times, which demand something new, and has at least
a foundation in the noble unmetered verse of the Bible.
Along with this 'Everlasting Yea' or chapter of re-affirmation go
little singing essays and excerpts in marvellously nervous prose
labelled with this or that title: 'The Bible as Poetry'; 'Father Taylor
and Oratory'; 'A Word about Tennyson' (originally published in this
journal, together with 'What Lurks behind Shakspeare's Historical
Plays,' 'Five Thousand Poems', and 'Yonnondio'). The soul looks out
through these jewelled eyes: they are windows of the poet's soul looking
toward Jerusalem. Father Taylor moved the 'good gray poet' as no orator
had ever done before. In the essay on 'Slang in America,' there is food
for the philologist. The War memoranda and glimpses of hospital life
contained in them are Tacitean in brevity and picturesqueness,
everywhere quick and alive with pathos and pity.
The woes of Andromache quail before these. It is this great fiery chasm
of woe into which the artist looked for an instant, with all its
Dantesque horror, and then, brooding over brotherhood, union, democracy,
sang Leaves of Grass, 'My Captain,' 'Calamus,' and all that me quoque
which forms the essential germ of the Whitman gospel: egotism not as an
abstraction but as an intensely concrete, kindled, personal necessity of
modern democratic verse asserting itself triumphantly. Other blossoms
of these November Boughs are 'Abraham Lincoln,' which is as beautiful as
an epigram of Simonides; 'New Orleans in 1848'; 'Last of the War Cases';
'Elias Hicks'; and 'The Old Bowery.' The latter is a theatrical
efflorescence: full of notes and historiettes of the magical times of
the elder Booth, Charles Kean, Mario, Alboni, and the old Park Theatre:
a 'bough' hung thick with leaf and fruit and clustering recollection.
On the whole, all these 'boughs' together make a very rich bouquet, tied
at every twig with a love- knot for the reader, and full of the unction
and eloquence of a most sweet personality.