The Use of Symbols in Whitman's Works

A symbol is an emblem, a concrete object that stands for something abstract; for example, the dove is a symbol of peace; the cross, Christianity. Literary symbols, however, have a more particular connotation. They sometimes signify the total meaning, or the different levels of meaning, which emerge from the work of art in which they appear. A white whale is just an animal-but in Melville's Moby Dick it is a god to some characters, evil incarnate to others, and a mystery to others. In other words, it has an extended connotation which is symbolic.

In the mid_1880s, the Symbolist movement began in France, and the conscious use of symbols became the favorite practice of poets. The symbolists and Whitman had much in common; both tried to interpret the universe through sensory perceptions, and both broke away from traditional forms and methods. But the symbols of the French symbolists were highly personal, whereas in Whitman the use of the symbol was governed by the objects he observed: the sea, the birds, the lilacs, the Calamus plant, the sky, and so on. Nevertheless, Whitman did have an affinity with the symbolists; they even translated some of his poems into French.

Whitman's major concern was to explore, discuss, and celebrate his own self, his individuality and his personality. Second, he wanted to eulogize democracy and the American nation with its achievements and potential. Third, he wanted to give poetical expression to his thoughts on life's great, enduring mysteries-birth, death, rebirth or resurrection, and reincarnation.

The Self

To Whitman, the complete self is both physical and spiritual. The self is man's individual identity, his distinct quality and being, which is different from the selves of other men, although it can identify with them. The self is a portion of the one Divine Soul. Whitman's critics have sometimes confused the concept of self with egotism, but this is not valid. Whitman is constantly talking about «I,» but the «I» is universal, a part of the Divine, and therefore not egotistic.

The Body and the Soul

Whitman is a poet of these elements in man, the body and the soul. He thought that we could comprehend the soul only through the medium of the body. To Whitman, all matter is as divine as the soul; since the body is as sacred and as spiritual as the soul, when he sings of the body or its performances, he is singing a spiritual chant.

Nature

Whitman shares the Romantic poet's relationship with nature. To him, as to Emerson, nature is divine and an emblem of God. The universe is not dead matter, but full of life and meaning. He loves the earth, the flora and fauna of the earth, the moon and stars, the sea, and all other elements of nature. He believes that man is nature's child and that man and nature must never be disjoined.

Time

Whitman's concept of the ideal poet is, in a way, related to his ideas on time. He conceives of the poet as a time-binder, one who realizes that the past, present, and future are «not disjoined, but joined,» that they are all stages in a continuous flow and cannot be considered as separate and distinct. These modem ideas of time have given rise to new techniques of literary expression-for example, the stream-of-consciousness viewpoint.

Cosmic Consciousness

Whitman believed that the cosmos, or the universe, does not consist merely of lifeless matter; it has awareness. It is full of life and filled with the spirit of God. The cosmos is God and God is the cosmos; death and decay are unreal. This cosmic consciousness is, indeed, one aspect of Whitman's mysticism.

Mysticism

Mysticism is an experience that has a spiritual meaning which is not apparent to the senses nor to the intellect. Thus mysticism, an insight into the real nature of man, God, and the universe, is attained through one's intuition. The mystic believes in the unity of God and man, man and nature, God and the universe. To a mystic, time and space are unreal, since both can be overcome by man by spiritual conquest. Evil, too, is unreal, since God is present everywhere. Man communicates with his soul in a mystical experience, and Whitman amply expresses his responses to the soul in Leaves of Grass, especially in «Song of Myself.» He also expresses his mystical experience of his body or personality being permeated by the supernatural. Whitman's poetry is his artistic expression of various aspects of his mystical experience.

Bardic Symbols

No one, even after the fourth or fifth reading, can pretend to say what the «Bardic Symbols» symbolize. The poet walks by the sea, and addressing the drift, the foam, the billows and the wind, attempts to force from them, by his frantic outcry, the the [sic] true solution of the mystery of Existence, always most heavily and darkly felt in the august ocean presence. All is confusion, waste and sound. It is in vain that you attempt to gather the poet's full meaning from what he says or what he hints. You can only take refuge in occasional passages like this, in which he wildly laments the feebleness and inefficiency of that art which above all others seeks to make the soul visible and audible:

O, baffled, lost,

Bent to the very earth, here preceding what follows,

Terrified with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,

Aware now, that amid all the blab, whose echoes recoil

upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or

what I am,

But that before all my insolent poems the real one still stands untouched, untold, altogether unreached,

Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory

signs and bows,

With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I

have written or shall write,

Striking me with insults till I fall helpless upon the sand.

If indeed, we were compelled to guess the meaning of the poem, we should say it all lay in the compass of these lines of Tennyson-the saddest and profoundest that ever were written:

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me! 1

An aspiration of mute words without relevancy, without absolute signification, and full of «divine despair 2 .»

We think it has been an error in Whitman to discard forms and laws, for without them the poet diffuses. He may hurry forward with impulses, but he is spent before he reaches the reader's heart through his bewildered understanding. Steam subject, is a mighty force; steam free, is an impalpable vapor, only capable of delicate hues and beauty with the sun upon it. But O, poet! there is not a sun in every sky.

The theme of love

Themes of sex and sexuality have dominated Leaves of Grass from the very beginning and have shaped the course of the book's reception. The first edition in 1855 contained what were to be called «Song of Myself,» «The Sleepers,» and «I Sing the Body Electric,» which are «about» sexuality (though of course not exclusively) throughout. From the very beginning, Whitman wove together themes of «manly love» and «sexual love,» with great emphasis on intensely passionate attraction and interaction, as well as bodily contact (touch, embrace) in both. Simultaneously in sounding these themes, he equated the body with the soul, and defined sexual experience as essentially spiritual experience. He very early adopted two phrenological terms to discriminate between the two relationships: «amativeness» for man-woman love «adhesiveness» for «manly love.» Although Whitman did not in the 1855 Preface call direct attention to this element in his work, in one of his anonymous reviews of his book («Walt Whitman and His Poems,» 1855) he wrote of himself and the 1855 Leaves: «The body, he teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beautiful…. Sex will not be put aside; it is a great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort» (Poetry and Prose 535).

Whitman added other sex poems to his book in 1856, including «Poem of Procreation» (now «A Woman Waits for Me») and «Bunch Poem» («Spontaneous Me»). At the end of the volume he included, without permission, Emerson's letter praising the 1855 Leaves (its «great power,» and «free and brave thought»), and alongside it he published his own letter in reply. He may have been misled by the nature of Emerson's praise to emphasize the centrality of his themes of adhesiveness and amativeness: «As to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print. I say the body of a man or woman, the main matter, is so far quite unexpressed in poems; but the body is to be expressed, and sex is» (Poetry and Prose 529).

It was not until the 1860 edition of Leaves that Whitman gathered the poems celebrating sexuality into the cluster «Enfans d'Adam» («Children of Adam») and the poems celebrating «manly love» into «Calamus.» When Whitman came to Boston to see his book through the press there, Emerson tried to persuade him to withdraw the sex poems, but Whitman refused. He probably understood that if he really desexed Leaves it would be like self-castration. Although Emerson never publicly withdrew his endorsement of Whitman, he passed up opportunities to repeat it. Emerson's silence together with Whitman's loss of his job at the Interior Department in 1865, charged with writing «indecent poems,» were early warning signs that he and his Leaves were embarked on a difficult road ahead.

In subsequent editions of Leaves, Whitman revised and shifted his poems of amativeness and adhesiveness, but by and large his dominant themes became not the body but the soul, not youth but old age-and death. His experience in the Civil War hospitals seems to have provided a turning point for Whitman's focus. He even claimed, in «A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads» (1888), that the war revealed to him, «as by flashes of lightning,» the «final reasons-for-being» of his «passionate song» (Poetry and Prose 516). In his Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (1865, later included in the 1867 Leaves), the «Calamus» theme runs throughout - «cropping out» as Whitman himself said of it in his 1876 Preface to Two Rivulets (Prose Works 2:471). Whitman critics have not failed to notice in «Drum-Taps» the poet's theme of adhesiveness-the joy in the physical transmuted by the war into pain and anguish-in such poems as «The Wound-Dresser,» «Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,» and «A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown.»

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