The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. Whitman Walt

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СКАЧАТЬ sunshine, such as sometimes play about the minds of deeply religious natures. Her animated manner seldom flagged, and charmed the taciturn to talking in his or her best humour.” Once, when speaking to Walt Whitman of the beauty of the human speaking voice, he replied: “The voice indicates the soul. Hers, with its varied modulations and blended tones, was the tenderest, most musical voice ever to bless our ears.”

      Her death was a long-lasting shock to Whitman. “She was a wonderful woman – a sort of human miracle to me… Her taking off … was a great[Pg xxxviii] shock to me: I have never quite got over it: she was near to me: she was subtle: her grasp on my work was tremendous – so sure, so all around, so adequate.” If this sounds a trifle self-centred in its criticism, not so was the poem which, in memory of her, he wrote as a fitting epitaph from the poet she had loved.

“GOING SOMEWHERE”

      My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend (Now buried in an English grave – and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake),

      Ended our talk – “The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern learning, intuitions deep,

      Of all Geologies – Histories – of all Astronomy – of Evolution, Metaphysics all,

      Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering,

      Life, life an endless march, an endless army (no halt, but, it is duly over),

      The world, the race, the soul – in space and time the universes,

      All bound as is befitting each – all surely going somewhere.”

       A WOMAN’S ESTIMATE OF WALT WHITMAN 1

       [FROM LETTERS BY ANNE GILCHRIST TO W. M. ROSSETTI.]

      June 23, 1869.– I am very sure you are right in your estimate of Walt Whitman. There is nothing in him that I shall ever let go my hold of. For me the reading of his poems is truly a new birth of the soul.

      I shall quite fearlessly accept your kind offer of the loan of a complete edition, certain that great and divinely beautiful nature has not, could not infuse any poison into the wine he has poured out for us. And as for what you specially allude to, who so well able to bear it – I will say, to judge wisely of it – as one who, having been a happy wife and mother, has learned to accept all things with tenderness, to feel a sacredness in all? Perhaps Walt Whitman has forgotten – or, through some theory in his head, has overridden – the truth that our instincts are beautiful facts of nature, as well as our bodies; and that we have a strong instinct of silence about some things.

      July 11.– I think it was very manly and kind of you to put the whole of Walt Whitman’s poems into my hands; and that I have no other friend who would have judged them and me so wisely and generously.

      I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I feel sometimes as if I had not bodily strength to read many of these poems. In the series headed “Calamus,” for instance, in some of the “Songs of Parting,” the “Voice out of the Sea,” the poem beginning “Tears, Tears,” &c., there is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, that mine refuses to beat under it, – stands quite still, – and I am obliged to lay the book down for a while. Or again, in the piece called “Walt Whitman,” and one or two others of that type, I am as one hurried through stormy seas, over high mountains, dazed with sunlight, stunned with a crowd and tumult of faces and voices, till I am breathless, bewildered, half dead. Then come parts and whole poems in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened. Living impulses flow out of these that make me exult in life, yet look longingly towards “the superb vistas of Death.” Those who admire this poem, and don’t care for that, and talk of formlessness, absence of metre, &c., are quite as far from any genuine recognition of Walt Whitman as his bitter detractors. Not, of course, that all the pieces are equal in power and beauty, but that all are vital; they grew – they were not made. We criticise a palace or a cathedral; but what is the good of criticising a forest? Are not the hitherto-accepted masterpieces of literature akin rather to noble architecture; built up of material rendered precious by elaboration; planned with subtile art that makes beauty go hand in hand with rule and measure, and knows where the last stone will come, before the first is laid; the result stately, fixed, yet such as might, in every particular, have been different from what it is (therefore inviting criticism), contrasting proudly with the careless freedom of nature, opposing its own rigid adherence to symmetry to her willful dallying with it? But not such is this book. Seeds brought by the winds from north, south, east, and west, lying long in the earth, not resting on it like the stately building, but hid in and assimilating it, shooting upwards to be nourished by the air and the sunshine and the rain which beat idly against that, – each bough and twig and leaf growing in strength and beauty its own way, a law to itself, yet, with all this freedom of spontaneous growth, the result inevitable, unalterable (therefore setting criticism at naught), above all things, vital, – that is, a source of ever-generating vitality: such are these poems.

      “Roots and leaves themselves alone are these,

      Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and from the pondside,

      Breast sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter than vines,

      Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the sun is risen,

      Breezes of land and love, breezes set from living shores out to you on the living sea, – to you, O sailors!

      Frost-mellowed berries and Third-month twigs, offered fresh to young persons wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,

      Love-buds put before you and within you, whoever you are,

      Buds to be unfolded on the old terms.

      If you bring the warmth of the sun to them, they will open, and bring form, colour, perfume, to you:

      If you become the aliment and the wet, they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches and trees.”

      And the music takes good care of itself, too. As if it could be otherwise! As if those “large, melodious thoughts,” those emotions, now so stormy and wild, now of unfathomed tenderness and gentleness, could fail to vibrate through the words in strong, sweeping, long-sustained chords, with lovely melodies winding in and out fitfully amongst them! Listen, for instance, to the penetrating sweetness, set in the midst of rugged grandeur, of the passage beginning, —

      “I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;

      I call to the earth and sea half held by the night.”

      I see that no counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that this rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with the fetters of metre. But I know that the music is there, and that I would not for something change ears with those who cannot hear it. And I know that poetry must do one of two things, – either own this man as equal with her highest completest manifestors, or stand aside, and admit that there is something come into the world nobler, diviner than herself, one that is free of the universe, and can tell its secrets as none before.

      I do not think or believe this; but see it with the same unmistakable definiteness of perception and full consciousness that I see the sun at this moment in the noonday sky, and feel his rays glowing down upon me as I write in the open air. What more can you ask of the works of a man’s mouth than that they should “absorb into you as food and air, to appear again in your strength, gait, face,” – that they should be “fibre and filter to your blood,” joy and gladness to your whole nature?

      I am СКАЧАТЬ