Free Upstream by Mary Oliver Page B

although he too was dead serious. Whitman did not, nor even the expansions of narrative. In “Song of Myself” and in passages beyond as well are page after page of portrait and instance; each opens in a blink and shuts on another. They are not stories; they are glances, possibilities. They are any of us, almost, in another life, and they expect of the reader a costly exchange; we cannot glide here upon narrative but must imaginatively take on other destinies:
    The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
    The carpenter dresses his plank . . . the tongueof his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp. . . . (p. 39)
    The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly. . . . (p. 41)
    The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm. . . .
    The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar. . . .
    The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case. . . . (p. 39)
    All are unforgettable, even, or especially:
    . . . the little child that peeped in at the door and then drew back and was never seen again. . . . (p. 78)
    Along with such portraits and moments of quickness and essence, Whitman turned upon the least detail of the manifest world such a fussy and diligent attention that the long lines lay down not so much ethereal as palpable. These lines with their iambic cadence and their end stops are like speech, yet not quite. They lack what speech so readily has—an uncertainty, a modesty, a feeling of attempt toward expression rather than reiteratedexactitude. Which is what Whitman has in such abundance: certitude, and a centering clarity of the least object.
    Still, for all its intensity, Whitman’s work is grammatically reasonable and abides by established rules. Such grammar-stability, compared for example with the syntactical compressions risked by Hopkins, makes a poetic line that is understandable, supple, and reliable. Such reliability assists Whitman’s capacity to stay mild, or to flare, as the need may be. His style is made up of many elements but is not complex. The tones are various: vatic, tender, patriotic, journalistic, impassioned, avuncular, sensual. Insistence and excess are not naturally virtues, but Whitman makes them virtues in the service of his purpose.
    Certain understandings still slip the search: How does the tender not become mincing? How does authority avoid pomp? How does cadence repeated and repeated summon rather than lull?
    Most writing implies a distant, possible, even probable audience of a few or of many.
Leaves of Grass
assumes an intimate audience of one—one who listens closely to the solitary speaker. That is, to each reader the poem reaches out personally. It is mentoring, it is concerned; it is intimate. It contains the voice of the teacher and the preacher too, but it extends beyond their range. “Touch is the miracle,” Whitman wrote in one of hisworkbooks. The words, in the long lines of
Leaves of Grass
, as near as words can be, are a spiritual and a physical touching.
4.
    A great loneliness was Whitman’s constant companion, his prod, his necessary Other. One sees it everywhere in his personal life, his professional life, his beautifying portrayals of young men, his intense and prolonged references to the body’s joy. It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty. Thus Whitman: grown man, lonely man. Sexual longing is the high note in the funneled-forth music of easy companionship with carriage drivers, sailors, wharf roughs, loose male energy, electric and swaggering. What else can we say? What else can we know? That it was not a trivial loneliness, or a passing loneliness, or a body loneliness only,