Is his Verse Poetry? 165 made them so if he had chosen; and third, that they are a good deal better than as if they were which reminds one of the pettifogger's announcement to the court that he would prove in behalf of his client, first, that the kettle was cracked when he borrowed it; second, that it was whole when he returned it; and third, that he never had the old kettle anyhow. XXIII Certainly at first sight the verse is rugged. and crude. There are sentences pages long, with dashes and parentheses, and catalogues as statistical as Homer's list of the ships. It is only when one has read considerable of it, and especially when one has read it aloud, that one begins to recognize what true ear for music Whitman had. In his use of words he is bound by no rules. He forces common words to new uses, as for instance : You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fiber your blood. He makes unusual compounds, and introduces his small stock of French, and Spanish, and Latin, on all occasions. For instance one of his poems begins: O mater! O fils! and a half-page down, he cries: O libertad! XXIV Karl Knortz, the German critic, says: Everyone who so far has ventured on the reading of "Leaves of Grass' " has had the following experiences: After the perusal of the first few pages it has seemed to him that the book must have been the work of a madman. Soon, however, he has been suddenly arrested by an original thought which has revealed to him the meaning of what he had so far read, and has irresistibly urged him to read further. He has found himself, then, in the condition of the magician's pupil in Goethe's ballad, who is unable to free himself from the spirits which he has called up. Whitman is himself well aware of this pecul iar magic, for he says frankly and openly: I teach straying from me, yet who can stray I follow you whoever you are from the pres ent hour, My words itch at your ears till you under- Again he says: XXV Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes. Is his Verse Poetry? I tramp a perpetual journey, 167 My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and a plain public road. XXVI It will not do to assume that he was careless about his use of English. On the other hand there is ample proof that he studied every word. Burroughs says that he pressed the language for years for some word or phrase that would express the sense of the evening call of the robin, and died without the sight. His song of the hermit thrush, already quoted, is exquisitely musical. He had even unusual regard for the typographical appearance of his poems. He liked a handsome page, and rather than have a chapter close at the end of the page he cut off a paragraph from "A Backward Glance "4. He quotes from his note-book a list of titles which he had proposed for his "Specimen Days", among which are: As the wild bee hums in May, Sands on the Shores of 64, As Voices in the Dusk, from Speakers far or hid, Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees, Flanges of Fifty Years. showing that far from disdaining the musical effect of words he dwelt upon it3. What a line is the last of the following verses from "Reconciliation" ": Word over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war. and all its deeds of carnage, must be utterly lost! That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world. XXVII Mr. Gosse finds Whitman only a potential poet, and says: His work is literature in the condition of protoplasm. He is a maker of poems in solution; the structural change which should have crystallized his fluid and teeming pages into forms of art never came. Rudolf Schmidt said, more acutely, that his style resembled a stream of noble molten metals; Joel Chandler Harris calls his verse: Is his Verse Poetry? 169 Not the poetry that culture stands in expectation of, nor the capers in verse and metre, but those rarer intimations and suggestions that are born in primeval solitudes, or come whirling from the vast funnel of the storm5. He says of his own writing that his rhythm and uniformity he will conceal in the roots of his verses, not to be seen of themselves, but to break forth loosely as lilacs on a bush, and take shapes compact, as the shapes of melons, or chestnuts, or pears*. XXVIII Burroughs well says: Whitman was not a builder. If he had the architectural power which the great poets have shown, he gave little proof of it. It was not required by the task he set before himself. His book is not a temple: it is a wood, a field, a highway; vista, vista, everywhere,-vanishing lights and shades, truths half disclosed, successions of objects, hints, suggestions, brief pictures, groups, voices, contrasts, blendings, and, above all, the tonic quality of the open air. The shorter poems are like herbs or leaves, or a handful of sprays gathered in a walk; never a thought carefully carved, and appealing to our sense of artistic form. * * * Whether the music of his verse as of winds and waves, the long, irregular, dithyrambic movement, its fluid and tonic character, the vastness of concep |