The Sea Is a Continual Miracle Read online

  Seafaring America

  RICHARD J. KING, Williams College-Mystic Seaport, Editor

  Seafaring America is a series of original and classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama bearing on the history of America’s engagement with our oceans and coastlines. Spanning diverse eras, populations, and geographical settings, the series strives to introduce, revive, and aggregate a wide range of exemplary and seminal stories about our American maritime heritage, including the accounts of First Peoples, explorers, voluntary and forced immigrants, fishermen, whalers, captains, common sailors, members of the navy and coast guard, marine biologists, and the crews of vessels ranging from lifeboats, riverboats, and tugboats to recreational yachts. As a sailor’s library, Seafaring America introduces new stories of maritime interest and reprints books that have fallen out of circulation and deserve reappraisal, and publishes selections from well-known works that reward reconsideration because of the lessons they offer about our relationship with the ocean.

  For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com

  The Palatine Wreck:

  The Legend of the New England Ghost Ship

  Jill Farinelli

  The Sea Is a Continual Miracle:

  Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman

  Walt Whitman, edited by Jeffrey Yang

  Surviving the Essex:

  The Afterlife of America’s Most Storied Shipwreck

  David O. Dowling

  Photograph of Whitman by Matthew Brady or Alexander Gardner, around 1862.

  The Sea Is a Continual Miracle

  Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman

  Edited by JEFFREY YANG

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND Hanover and London

  University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2017 Jeffrey Yang

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Seafaring America is supported and produced in part by the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport. Williams-Mystic empowers global, creative citizens while inspiring an enduring relationship with the ocean. We create an open-minded, interdisciplinary academic community, with experiential learning at Mystic Seaport, along the coasts of America, and at sea.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  NAMES: Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892 author. | Yang, Jeffrey editor.

  TITLE: The sea is a continual miracle: sea poems and other writings / by Walt Whitman; edited by Jeffrey Yang.

  DESCRIPTION: Hanover: University Press of New England, 2017. | Series: Seafaring America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016042857 (print) | LCCN 2017000895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512600599 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611689228 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781512600605 (epub, mobi & pdf)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Sea—Poetry. | Seafaring life—Poetry.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3203 .Y36 2017 (print) | LCC PS3203 (ebook) | DDC 818/.308—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042857

  To me the sea is a continual miracle,

  The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships, with men in them—what stranger miracles are there?

  —Walt Whitman

  Contents

  Series Editor’s Preface: Seafaring America

  Introduction: Apologia for the Sea

  A Note on the Text

  The Ocean (1842)

  The Mississippi at Midnight (1848)

  from Leaves of Grass (1855)

  from Leaves of Grass (1856)

  3. from Poem of Salutation

  11. Sun-Down Poem

  24. Poem of Perfect Miracles

  28. Bunch Poem

  31. Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth

  from Leaves of Grass (1860–61)

  from Proto-Leaf

  from Chants Democratic and Native American

  Apostroph

  from Leaves of Grass

  4. “Something startles me”

  Poem of Joys

  A Word Out of the Sea

  from Enfans d’Adam

  7. “You and I—what the earth is, we are”

  10. “Inquiring, tireless, seeking that yet unfound”

  from Calamus

  3. “Whoever you are holding me now in hand”

  4. “These I, singing in spring, collect for lovers”

  11. “When I heard at the close of the day”

  13. “Calamus taste”

  14. “Not heat flames up and consumes”

  19. “Mind you the timid models of the rest”

  26. “We two boys together clinging”

  31. “What ship, puzzled at sea”

  32. “What think you I take my pen in hand to record?”

  37. “A leaf for hand in hand!”

  Longings for Home

  from Messenger Leaves

  To Old Age

  Mannahatta

  from Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps: When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d and Other Poems (1865–66)

  Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps

  City of Ships

  The Torch

  The Ship

  Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd

  World, Take Good Notice

  from When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d

  O Captain! My Captain!

  from Leaves of Grass (1867)

  from Starting from Paumanok

  from Children of Adam

  From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

  Facing West from California’s Shores

  from Song of the Open Road

  Respondez!

  As If a Phantom Caress’d Me

  from Songs Before Parting

  from As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shores

  Song at Sunset

  from Leaves of Grass (1871–72), Passage to India (1871), and As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (1872)

  from Inscriptions

  In Cabin’d Ships at Sea

  from Songs of Insurrection

  France, the 18th Year of These States

  from Passage to India

  Passage to India

  from Whispers of Heavenly Death

  Whispers of Heavenly Death

  from Leaves of Grass

  Warble for Lilac-Time

  from Now Finale to the Shore

  Now Finale to the Shore

  The Untold Want

  Joy, Shipmate, Joy!

  from As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free

  As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free

  O Star of France!

  By Broad Potomac’s Shore

  from Leaves of Grass (1876) and Two Rivulets (1876)

  The Beauty of the Ship

  from Two Rivulets

  Two Rivulets

  Or from That Sea of Time

  Eidólons

  Spain, 1873–74

  Prayer of Columbus

  from Leaves of Grass (1881–82)

  Sea-Drift

  Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

  As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

  Tears

  To the Man-of-War Bird

  Aboard at a Ship’s Helm

  On the Beach at Night

  The World Below the Brine

  On the Beach at Night Alone

  Song for All Seas, All Ships

  Patroling Barnegat

  After the Sea-Ship

  from Autumn Rivulets

  As Consequent, Et
c.

  from Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83)

  Paumanok, and My Life on It as Child and Young Man

  My Passion for Ferries

  An Interregnum Paragraph

  To the Spring and the Brook

  A July Afternoon by the Pond

  from Autumn Side-Bits

  A Winter Day on the Sea-Beach

  Sea-Shore Fancies

  A Two-Hours’ Ice-Sail

  An Afternoon Scene

  A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

  A Jaunt Up the Hudson

  Manhattan from the Bay

  A Night Remembrance

  Delaware River—Days and Nights

  Scenes on Ferry and River—Last Winter’s Nights

  Up the Hudson to Ulster County

  An Ulster County Waterfall

  Hudson River Sights

  Departing of the Big Steamers

  Swallows on the River

  New Senses—New Joys

  Unfulfilled Wants—the Arkansas River

  Earth’s Most Important Stream

  Nights on the Mississippi

  A Hint of Wild Nature

  Seeing Niagara to Advantage

  The St. Lawrence Line

  The Savage Saguenay

  Chicoutimi and Ha-Ha Bay

  My Native Sand and Salt Once More

  An Ossianic Night—Dearest Friends

  Only a New Ferry Boat

  The Great Unrest of Which We Are a Part

  from Leaves of Grass (1891–92)

  from Sands at Seventy

  Paumanok

  From Montauk Point

  A Font of Type

  Fancies at Navesink

  (The Pilot in the Mist—Had I the Choice—You Tides with Ceaseless Swell—Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning—And Yet Not You Alone—Proudly the Flood Comes In—By That Long Scan of Waves—Then Last of All.)

  With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

  Of That Blithe Throat of Thine

  Yonnondio

  The Voice of the Rain

  Twenty Years

  The Dismantled Ship

  from Good-Bye My Fancy

  Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht!

  Lingering Last Drops

  An Ended Day

  Old Age’s Ship & Crafty Death’s

  Shakspere-Bacon’s Cipher

  To the Sun-set Breeze

  A Twilight Song

  A Voice from Death

  A Persian Lesson

  Grand Is the Seen

  from A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads

  “There is a river . . .” (Date unknown)

  Notes

  Index of Titles

  Series Editor’s Preface

  SEAFARING AMERICA

  The Inupiat of far northern Alaska have for centuries said that the bowhead whale lives two human lifetimes. In Moby-Dick, the primary entrepôt of all American literature of the sea, Ishmael yarns about a stone lance in an old whale: “It might have been darted by some Nor’-West Indian long before America was discovered.” By studying amino acids in the eyes of legally killed bowhead whales and dating the old lances of stone, ivory, and steel found buried in the blubber, twenty-first century researchers have confirmed that some individuals of this species might indeed live over two hundred years. A bowhead swimming around the thinning ice of the Arctic in 2015, when the Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco wrote, “We all belong to the sea between us,” likely also swam in 1859 when Emily Dickinson penciled the lines: “Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea”—and then put them in her drawer.

  Since the first human settlement of our coasts, the voices expressing the American relationship with the sea have been diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, geography, and experience. And the study of maritime literature and history continues to converge and circulate with marine science and contemporary policy.

  Seafaring America seeks to inspire and explore ocean study in this twenty-first century. The Taino chief Hatuey, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Winslow Homer, Alexander Agassiz, Joshua Slocum, Kate Chopin, Samuel Eliot Morison, Langston Hughes, Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeffrey Yang, and generations of other American mariners, artists, writers, scientists, and historians have all known that the ocean is the dominant ecological, meteorological, political, and metaphorical force on Earth.

  “The sea is History,” wrote Derek Walcott in 1979, mourning the horrors of the Middle Passage and the drowned African American cultural memory. By the 1970s the sea was history in a new way. Americans began to perceive the global ocean as vulnerable to our destructive reach. The realization rolled in with the discovery of the dead zone off the Mississippi River delta, industrial overfishing off New England, and the massive oil spill that spoiled the same Santa Barbara sands on which Richard Henry Dana Jr. first landed his bare Boston Brahmin feet in 1835 after a passage of 150 days. Yet even today, the rising seas, floods, shipwrecks, and immutable tempests along the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and America’s Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coasts continue to remind us of an immortal and indifferent sea—a savage ocean that crashes and seeps over the transience of Homo sapiens.

  Seafaring America is a series of new and classic works of fiction, nonfiction, history, poetry, and drama that engages with the country’s enduring relationship with the oceans and coastlines. Seafaring America strives to introduce, revive, and aggregate a wide range of exemplary and seminal stories and verse about the American maritime heritage: to trace the footprints on the beach, the stone lances in the blubber, and the pearls in the drawer.

  Richard J. King

  Williams College-Mystic Seaport

  Introduction: Apologia for the Sea

  As idly drifting down the ebb,

  Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore.

  —Walt Whitman

  Walt Whitman! The White Whale of American poetry. A vital amalgam of mythology and critical biography, invention and endless interpretation. His reflection of our nation as a “Centre of equal daughters, and equal sons . . . Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,” resounds across the land like a mourning song. His legendary names reach out to us across the formless waters: the Bard of Democracy, the Bard of America and of the Kosmos, the Bard of the Body (and of the Soul and Mortality), the Poet of Equality. He is our Pioneer, our Archetype, our Precedent, our prelapsarian Adam, our Dante, or along with Emily Dickinson, our Poet Progenitor, our Prototype, our Generative Figure, or simply, our Good Gray Poet. He is our Vast Albatross, as the poet Hilda Doolittle once wrote, “great, wide-winged, sea-soaked.”

  In Whitman’s poetry, the Singer and the Song coincide with the birth of a literature that lives on and on, toward an unwavering, expectant future in our postexpectant present.

  My first memory of him goes back to my sophomore year of high school. A friend had chosen to recite Whitman’s elegy for President Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” for a class assignment. She mounted a portrait of the president onto a cardboard altar, covered the image with thick drips of wax, and arranged the altar at the front of the classroom. She spread out some candles before the altar, lit them, turned out the lights, started the tape deck (I’m remembering the soundtrack to Twin Peaks), and proceeded to wail, “O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done.” I was hooked. I tracked down a used leather-bound copy of Leaves of Grass, illustrated with woodcuts. Many years later I would discover that edition was just one of many Whitman had published during his lifetime. That in fact, Leaves of Grass, as Roger Asselineau’s marvelous biography first showed, was a work in progress, part of a “constantly changing continuum” of revisions and editions, its design more open ended than not. A line by the poet Charles Reznikoff relates so aptly to this aspect of Whitman’s lifework: “The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water”—a line I once saw collaged so small onto a gray, churning image of the sea painted by Mary Oppen.

  Forty years ago in his encomiu
m to the poet, Guy Davenport observed that “no one phrase is ever going to label Whitman’s theme.” The sea, though, can encompass it—puts it in place, gives it its pace. In line after line, the poet walks along it, breathes it, smells it, swims in it, sits by it, bathes in it, listens to it, sails and ferries and steamboats on it, talks to it. His young friend John Burroughs—a nature writer who became one of the most popular writers in America and the author of an early critical study of Whitman that Whitman himself contributed to and edited—observed late in the poet’s life, “There is sea-salt in Whitman’s poetry, strongly realistic epithets and phrases, that had their birth upon the shore, and that perpetually recur to one as he saunters on the beach. No phase of nature seems to have impressed him so deeply as the sea, or recurs so often in his poems.” Burroughs even thought his friend had “a look about him of the gray, eternal sea that he so loved, near which he was born, and that had surely set its seal upon him.”

  This seal, set upon the poet as a child, was like an amulet that cast a spell upon him until his dying breath. In his twilight years, Whitman said of the sea in his prose sketches Specimen Days, “I remember well, I felt that I must one day write a book expressing this liquid, mystic theme. Afterward, I recollect, how it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition.” He goes on to describe

  a dream, a picture, that for years at intervals, (sometimes quite long ones, but surely again, in time,) has come noiselessly up before me, and I really believe, fiction as it is, has enter’d largely into my practical life—certainly into my writings, and shaped and color’d them. It is nothing more or less than a stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums. This scene, this picture, I say, has risen before me at times for years. Sometimes I wake at night and can hear and see it plainly.

  Unlike many nineteenth-century authors whose experiences of long sea voyages fed directly into their writing, either through the navy or merchant marine or a whaling or scientific expedition, Whitman never shipped off to any lands beyond. Of traveling abroad, he once wrote, “Shall I journey four thousand miles to weigh the ashes of some corpses? Shall I not vivify myself with life here, rushing, tumultuous, scornful, masterful, oceanic—greater than ever before known?”