2.5.2 Two other elements in the myth: water and swimmers
2.5.2 Two other elements in the myth: water and swimmers
The myth of calamus, as quoted in section 2.5.1 above, brings up other features that are present in the Leaves, besides the reed, which is really a central symbol in Leaves of Grass. They are water and swimmers. Water appears in many poems and sections of the book; however, the poet has an important relationship with the sea. The following poems address this symbolism of water: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”, both from the cluster “SEA-DRIFT”, which was compiled in 1881, even though these poems had been actually written in 1859. “Out of the Cradle…” depicts the poet’s awakening as a bard, when he is wishing to receive a clue from the sea, so that he can have a confirmation of his intuition. “As I Ebb’d…”, which was originally titled “Bardic Symbols”, describes the hard times the poet is undergoing, when he speaks to his “fierce old mother”, the sea, about his not understanding any thing at all and his oppression for having dared to open his mouth. In this sense, in “Out of the Cradle…” the poet receives the answer he was asking for in “As I Ebb’d…” Speaking of these emotionally oscillating but highly creative times of Whitman’s, Canby states in his “Study in Biography” of the American bard: “So he writes a poem [“As I Ebb’d…”] made entirely out of symbols of the ebbing and flowing sea which he knew so well, and the shores on which are flotsam and jetsam […]” (1943, p.181). “Flotsam and jetsam” are objects washed ashore, wreckage or remains from ships left floating, which is similar to the “trail of drift and debris”, a metaphor that the poet uses to describe himself in “As I Ebb’d…” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.395).
As the two poems are closely related, we will add some comments on them. The following lines from the end of “Out of the Cradle…” show both the moment of awakening and the “clew”, the “word” (Death) he needed to hear from the sea to confirm his “Premonition”[1] about his own future, after he had sung about his own reminiscences as a child on that shore, where he saw a suffering he-bird that had lost his mate and was there singing sadly:
Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.
[…]
O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
[…]
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
[…]
My own songs, awaked from that hour;
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song, and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper’d me.
(WHITMAN, 2002, p.211)
There are many “clues” to Whitman’s poetry, such as words or verses that serve to guide us in our reading of Leaves of Grass, because they carry more information than we might glance at first sight. We will try to point them out whenever we find them. When such a piece appears, we will add a footnote on it, as it can be verified in the translated poems chapter. In this poem, we believe the word “clew” is the clue, the hint, the indication for us here: “clew” means “a ball of yarn or thread”, the same ball of thread that Ariadne, one of Minos’ daughters, gave to Theseus “so that he would not lose his way in the Labyrinth”. After Theseus had killed the Minotaur, he sabotaged the Cretan ships and escaped accompanied by Ariadne and the other Athenians who had been saved. When Theseus reached Naxos, they went to rest. But the next day Theseus abandoned Ariadne there and sailed home. Later, he stopped by Delos to consecrate in the temple a statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, lust, beauty, and sexuality. After his father’s death (Aegeus, who threw himself into the sea, for he believed his son was dead when he saw the black sails of his boat – Theseus was supposed to hoist the white sails of victory if he returned), Theseus disposed of the Pallantidae (the fifty sons of Pallas) and assumed power in Attica, uniting in a single city the inhabitants who had been spread around the countryside, and Athens became the capital of the state. Theseus gave it essential political institutions, he conquered and incorporated Megara, and, among other deeds, reorganized the Isthmian Games at Corinth in honor of Poseidon, who, in Greek mythology, was the god of the sea as well as of horses and, as “Earth-Shaker”, of earthquakes. In this short account of myths, which we found by following the “clue/clew” given by the poet, we can see features of Whitman’s poetry, such as his necessity to escape from the labyrinth of his mind/emotions, as he writes in the poem “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life”, in which the poet feels “oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth”, and that he is “but a trail of drift and debris”, seeking protection from his “fierce old mother” (the sea) and “upon [the] breast [of his] father”, “Paumanok […] [the] fish-shaped island” where he lives, which he did through poetry, following the clew given by the sea that answered his prayer. Sought by Whitman and present in the myths are also love, union, essential political institutions, and the ancient culture and mythology that he never rejected. And finally the Hero, uniter of the people, who followed a clew given by a feminine deity, Ariadne (left by Theseus – acting on the command of the gods -, she was married by Dionysus and taken to Olympus). Another interpretation for this myth in America points to President Lincoln, who, like the Greek myth, had to fight against his fellowmen to establish a new state (Theseus fought his 50 cousins, the Pallantidae) and after being killed, received a magnificent funeral, for both had been protectors of democracy, fugitive slaves and poor people (GRIMAL, 1991, pp.429-35).
It is not easy to understand the response, the “clew,” given by the sea if we consider the word death out of the context of Whitman’s whole poetry. For how could this word be so delicious to any one and a path to life? Only by studying Whitman’s works can we realize the meaning of death to him, although in the myth of Theseus we can also see that death, or destruction, was a necessary stage before building or rebuilding/rebirth: death is an outlet, as Whitman sings in “Memories of President Lincoln”, section 4: “Death’s outlet song of life” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.460); death is a door, a passage, a way that connects one thing to another, like the thread that saved Theseus. In this sense, as he had already sung in section 6 of “Song of Myself”, “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death”, for “All goes onward and outward,” and “nothing collapses”, for the reason that we are all spiritually immortal. Death is just the passageway from mortality to immortality, from material to immaterial, from the world of appearances to the real world, which is spiritual, and also, in the material/physical world from a phase to another, from destruction of a form of organization that is not capable of expressing the whole of a nation to a new form of organization that might serve that purpose better, as it happened in the American Civil War. In this manner, the episode of Lincoln’s murder can be viewed as a part of that context as well. So, be death a mythical, religious, personal or societal process, it remains a necessary stage to the awareness of something greater, better, different or new. He gives us this clue in many poems. For example, in the same cluster, “SEA-DRIFT”, in the poem “On the Beach at Night”, in which he depicts a weeping child, he says to the child who is “holding the hand of her father”, speaking of immortality:
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons, shall again shine.
[…]
Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun, or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters, the Pleiades. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.399)
And to confirm what he had said before, in the next cluster, “By the Roadside”, in the now famous poem “O Me! O Life”[2], the poet himself gives the answer:
O ME! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
(WHITMAN, 1996, p.410)
Although the poet could at times falter, and suffer like any other human being, he would always recover and renew his hopes in life and immortality, and leave the bad moments behind. We can see this in a later cluster, appropriately titled “Whispers of Heavenly Death”, originally published in Passage to India, 1871, in a poem called “O Living Always, Always Dying”, in which he buries his own dead and seeks living:
O LIVING always, always dying!
O the burials of me, past and present!
O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at, where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind!
(WHITMAN, 1996, p.565)
In “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life”, in which the poet addresses the sea/ocean as his symbolic “fierce old mother”, with her “endless cries for her castaways” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.394), he shows he accepts the circling law of nature, which returns with every returning spring, like the love of his liquid mother: “Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return)” (1996, p.396), he sings sure that after a time of decline the tide of life will rise again. Thus, it is necessary to “leave the corpses behind”, so that we can welcome life when it comes back. If we adhere to a past that is dead, we will remain dead and blind to life when it appears. However, if we leave what is dead behind, when we enter life again, what is alive in the past will be integrated into our present. And what remained dead will become “This Compost”, decaying organic matter that will serve as nutrients to the roots of what is living. As it happens when “distemper’d corpses” and “sour dead” are deposited in the earth, because the Earth “grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, / […] It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last” (WHITMAN, 2002, pp.309-11). This is the way the poet actually does, for he accepts everything in his large heart: what is good and what is evil of America, as he sings in “Song of Myself”, section 22: “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.” Indeed, the poet himself is clearly aware that his physical body will follow that path too, and will be transmuted by the incredible chemistry of the soil, as he chants in section 49 of “Song of Myself” (2002, p.75): “And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me”. He assumes the same attitude in section 52: “I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, / I effuse my flesh in eddies/ and drift it in lacy jags. // I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (2002, p.77). All this transformation within the cycles of nature was shown above in the myth of Calamus, where the swimmer became a reed.
Another poem where the poet deals with the water is “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, in which he speaks to the river below – the East River in New York City, which separates Long Island, where the borough of Brooklyn is located, from the island of Manhattan: “Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.135). This poem is an excellent counterpoint to “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life”, in which the poet expresses his sadness and despair[3], and needs desperately to be embraced by his symbolic father, “Paumanok”, and his “fierce old mother”, the sea. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, he is at his “high tide”, at the flood tide of his career as a poet, letting his inspiration flow like the high water. At this moment, coherently high, he sings in section 3 (2002, p.136): “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt […]”. Like the East River, which, despite the name, is a tidal strait and not a river[4], the poet’s “afflatus” and emotions follow the ups and downs of the tides[5], which are in phase with the cyclic rising and falling of Earth’s ocean surface caused by the tidal forces of the Moon and the Sun acting on the Earth. Perhaps that is the reason why, even in low moments like the one described in “As I Ebbed…”, he did not lose faith in life, in Nature or in God, or even in his many friends, knowing that the low waters would give way to high waters again, which made him sing: “Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!” (section 9, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; 2002, p.139). Thus, at this crossing, a trip that he loved so much to take on the ferry between Brooklyn and Manhattan, he knows this time he is at a climax, totally open to give his heart and mind and receive the same from others, totally unafraid of what is to come, feeling “The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;” (section 2; 2002, p.136), and letting himself go with it. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” appeared in the 1856 Edition, and received the following comment by Allen:
But powerful and sustained as the “Poem of Salutation [“Salut au Monde!”] is, it is far surpassed by “Sun-Down Poem” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”), the masterpiece of the first two editions. Here the poet transmutes his own dream life and personal experience into esthetic form. The imagery is real, rising vividly out of the poet’s own memory, but the sentiment and the intuition transcend the actual. For the first time Whitman has everything under control – theme, imagery, rhythm, and symbolism – a feat which he would be able to repeat in major poems only two or three times during the remainder of his life. […] the poem is, in fact, a masterly demonstration of self-control, and shows what Whitman might have done if self-control had not been so difficult for him. (1955, p.184)
After speaking of water, we turn to the image of a swimmer, which naturally can not be separated from that of the water. Swimmers represent in the Leaves the ideal of perfectly healthy bodies, as we can see from the adjectives used by the poet to refer to them. Swimmers play an important part in poems like: 1) “From Pent-up Aching Rivers” (from “Children of Adam”), where “The welcome nearness, the sight of the perfect body, / The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back lying and floating” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.79), in which he praises the perfection and health of the human body; 2) in “I Sing the Body Electric”, where the poet sings “The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water” (2002, p.81), the silent beauty of a man in the water; and 3) in “Song of Myself” (section 46), where he sings “Now I will you to be a bold swimmer”, after washing the gum from the eyes of a “dear son” and showing him the “dazzle of the light and of every moment” (2002, p.73) of his life, literally showing the boy the light of whom he was a loving comrade. Again, in the poem “The Sleepers”, he sees “a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea / His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs” (2002, p.359), and he stands there appreciating the struggle between the swimmer and the sea, until “His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is continually bruis’d on rocks” and finally, just like Calamus swimming in the river, “Swiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.” (p.359). This section of “The Sleepers” is the most direct reference to the myth of Calamus, for the entire section 3 is dedicated to the description of the swimmer and his death by water.
We should not forget to mention that Whitman himself was a swimmer[6] and he enjoyed his baths in Brooklyn and Manhattan when he was a young compositor and then journalist. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, section 5 (2002, p.137), he mentions it: “I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it”. He also enjoyed his bathing by the sea on Long Island (“fish-shaped Paumanok”), where he was born. There is even a poem that was actually part of a longer poem in which he describes himself as a swimmer. This poem is “His Shape Arises” (title according to the first line of the poem), taken from “Song of the Broad-Axe”. It was published in 1856 and excluded from “Song of the Broad-Axe” in 1860. This new poem was made by excluding it from the longer poem. Nevertheless, it is worth quoting it here in order for us to see how the poet conceived of himself physically. Actually, it is a self-portrait:
His shape arises,
Arrogant, masculine, naive, rowdyish,
Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman,
Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea,
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean- breathed,
Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full- blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back,
Countenance sun-burnt, bearded, calm, unrefined,
Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms,
Attitudes lithe and erect, costume free, neck gray and open, of slow movement on foot,
Passer of his right arm round the shoulders of his friends, companion of the street,
Persuader always of people to give him their sweetest touches, and never their meanest,
A Manhattanese bred, fond of Brooklyn, fond of Broadway, fond of the life of the wharves and the great ferries,
Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere, easily understood after all,
Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his phrenology,
Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive, of copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, self-esteem, comparison, individuality, form, locality, eventuality,
Avowing by life, manners, works, to contribute illustrations of results of The States,
Teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism,
Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against his. (WHITMAN, 2002, pp.550-1)
Whitman presents himself in the poem as the “summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea”, the same sea which he loved so much and enjoyed fully to the end, and which he called as his dear “mother”. The poet reveals himself in every word he writes, showing the boldness of a swimmer who faces strong currents. When reading Allen’s excellent biography of Walt Whitman, The Solitary Singer (1955), we realize that the poet was being entirely honest with his readers. Even when the poet is incoherent, which is what he confessed when he assumed his contradictions, he is being sincere; as he was in “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life”, when he described hard moments in his life. In “His Shape Arises”, which was part of “Song of the Broad-Axe”, a poem that describes “the heroic shape” of the new Man, he is deeply moving, sincere, genuine and trustworthy. Not a word can be dropped from the lines above. Even when he is being contradictory, singing that he is “naïve, rowdyish”, “laughter, weeper”, “worker, idler”, “citizen, countryman”, or “calm, unrefined”. One might even think that he is boasting about himself when he writes that he is capable “of copious friendship”, but that is true. He did have many loyal friends in the U.S. and overseas. As he is true when he says that he is a “Teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism”, that is, the tendency to speak or write of oneself excessively and boastfully. However, someone who was born from a working class family (his father was a carpenter and his mother a housewife), had at most six years of formal education, started working at the age of eleven, did self-education from then on, studied the great classics by himself, and eventually became the greatest poet of America, certainly could be boastful. Contradictory as he was, the words that describe him best are honest, frank, loving, unselfish, as well as arrogant, proudish and egotistical.
In this sense, this proud “Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against his” once again indicates the myth of Calamus challenging Carpus to find out the better swimmer, which caused Carpus to drown while they were swimming against each other. As there are several scenes that illustrate the myth in the Leaves, we should take a look at part of a poem from “Children of Adam”, which is practically a modern version of the myth: “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d”:
We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, […]
(WHITMAN, 2002, pp.92-3)
To resume the topic of metamorphosis, we believe the poet is speaking in this poem of an unfulfilled terrestrial love that can only be realized transcendentally in nature. And he does this by disguising it under different natural forms, so that no one could judge him. He might also be describing his love in a way that he could escape the censorship of his time, the love he had for a person that he could not show in public. As he could not suppress what he felt, he expressed it in a way that people would not consider disrespectful or offensive to society. Perhaps this was his way to say that love is so natural that all elements in nature manifest it spontaneously, in its various kingdoms: mineral (rocks), vegetable (oaks) and animal (two among herds, fishes). What we can in fact say is that in these scenes where the swimmers are depicted, there is no physical contact between the observer and the person observed. The poet describes what he sees from a distance, as if he were painting a picture of another creature moving in a landscape where he has no direct participation.
Speaking of distancing between persons, when there is a physical contact between someone and the person in the water, it is another person than the poet-observer that performs it. For example, in section 11 of “Song of Myself”, it is the “lady” who has lived “twenty eight years” of a lonesome life by the river bank that watches the “twenty eight young men […] by the shore” and later, resistless to the attraction, approaches the boys and touches her hand to their bodies, while the “young men float on their backs” and “do not think whom they souse with spray”. It is a quite erotic passage that does not involve the poet personally. In this case, we could argue that the poet is representing himself in someone who is watching the boys from afar, a spectator or even voyeur, who looks at them from behind window blinds, someone for whom direct physical contact is too much. Naturally, this distance does not prevent him from looking at and describing everything “with love”[7], such as the love that the “lady” feels for the boys, even if they look unattractive to her. With regard to details of Whitman’s personal life, biographers and critics agree that there is nothing much to be said, for the poet was intent on leaving no records on that. So what we know of him is in the Leaves and in his prose works, which, by the way, give us at least his feelings and thoughts on the world around him. Personally, Whitman was careful enough to remain “evasive” about himself in his poetry, and although he promised to “tell us all”, he “tells us so little”, as Bloom complains (1985, p.1-3). What Whitman tells the reader, he tells by “indirections”, that is, by symbols, by myths, by the eyes and hands of another person, and this is what we need to study.
[1] “Premonition” was the first title of the poem “Starting from Paumanok”, in which the poet set his “programme of chants”.
[2] This poem is quoted by Mr. John Keating, a character played by Robin Williams, in the 1989 Peter Weir movie Dead Poets Society: “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless–of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
[3] Allen says of Whitman in The Solitary Singer (1955, p.247), in relation to “As I Ebb’d…”: “Whether the poet felt himself to be physically, emotionally, or morally wrecked the reader can only guess, and the biographer has no objective evidence. Whitman’s recent loss of his editorship, and his inability to provide for his mother as he felt he should, may have been partly responsible for this vicarious sympathy with the debris and human wrecks. But the poetic failure was evidently a major factor […]”.
[4] It connects Upper New York Bay, which is the northern area of New York Harbor, on its south end, where the Statue of Liberty is found, to Long Island Sound, which is an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean on its north end. Information available at: <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9031795/East-River> Accessed on August 14, 2007.
[5] The following verses from “Starting from Paumanok” show this kind of phenomena in his mind and heart: “This then is life, / Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions” (Sec. 2; 2002, p.15). And, as he always recorded in many passages, he felt that his soul was above all these “convulsions” here on Earth: “The soul, / Forever and forever – longer than soil is brown and solid – longer than water ebbs and flows.” (Sec. 6; 2002, p17), which adds to the idea mentioned above that he believed in something beyond the material movements on the face of the planet. And these verses from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, Sec. 2, show the same confidence in himself as well as in humanity, Nature and God: “A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, / Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.” (2002, p.136).
[6] Canby (1943, p.22) reminds us of this in this brief physical description of Walt: “By 1834 and 1835, still unsettled in a lasting job, Walt was a big fellow, probably already six feet, heavy, but not athletic, a rambler on beaches, farms, city streets. He played no games except tossing a ball, was hearty, healthy, a swimmer, a dreamer […].”
[7] Canby (1943, p.98) describes Whitman’s empathy in this way: “He has never seen a wreck, though there were wrecks on the dangerous South Shore of Long Island while he was living near-by, but in Song of Myself, he identifies himself completely with the courageous devotion of the rescuers: ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there.’ He has never seen a runaway slave captured, but he can identify himself with tortured humanity. He knows, at this time, not too much intimately about drovers and fishers and axemen and criminals and carpenters and vigorous farmers, though he has seen them all, talked with them, lived with them. Yet he feels capable of representing them, because he enters their personalities, not as an observer merely, but with love. He makes so complete an identification between his soul and what he will write, that he will be able to say when the ‘Leaves’ have expanded into a real book, ‘Who touches this touches a man.”
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