Language is a bit odd in that it allows some words to have two contradictory meanings — a phenomenon known, among other things, as a “contranym.” One frequent example in English is “cleave,” which can mean to split asunder or to glue together. In this case, as Wikipedia explains it, “Some pairs of contronyms are true homographs, i.e., distinct words with different etymology which happen to have the same form. For instance cleave ‘separate’ is from Old English clēofan, while cleave ‘adhere’ is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently.”[i] While intriguing, such homographs interest me less than words which develop two somewhat contradictory meanings through long use. Some lexicographers want to consider them all as homographs; I prefer to think of them as products of double-mindedness.
For example, to want something is both to lack something and to desire something. But if I say “I am somewhat wanting in couth,” [ii] I do not imply that because I am uncouth I do not desire couth. According to my dictionary, the word came into Middle English as wanten, from the Old Norse vanta, to be lacking.[iii] From that sense of lacking something developed the sense of desiring that thing. So it is a truism bordering on tautology to say that we want what we do not have, and what we have we do not want.
One further example: “dear” has two somewhat related senses, that which is precious to us and that which is costly. Gollum discovered the link in his Precious, and again it goes back to Middle English, in this case to dere, Old English deōre from a hypothetical Common Germanic deuriaz, worthy, costly, dear.[iv] From that Middle English sense arises “dearth,” or “Scarcity, lack, paucity,” and again “Shortage of food; famine.”[v] So what does this have to do with the putative subject of this blog, verse? Especially its recent maunderings? Well, both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson acted like there was a dearth of words in the land. They hoarded them.
Since Dickinson is the next poet whose work I will examine, I will merely advert here to her well-known habit of writing on any available scrap of paper that came to hand, a habit illustrated in the header of this website: http://www.emilydickinson.org/[vi]. This may reflect a habit of frugality related to her choice of hymn-book meters for her poems, which she, as Thomas H. Johnson put it, “adapted to her own requirements of suppleness and variety, retardment and acceleration.”[vii] She was also a sharp-eyed reader and critic, as this poem demonstrates:
You’re right – “the way is narrow” –
And “difficult the Gate” –
And “few there be” – Correct again –
That “enter in – thereat” –
‘Tis Costly – so are purples!
‘Tis just the price of Breath –
With but the “Discount” of the Grave –
Termed by the Brokers – “Death”!
And after that – there’s Heaven –
The Good man’s – “Dividend” –
And Bad men – “go to Jail” –
I guess –
I was unfamiliar with this poem before I found it on the Poetry Foundation website, in a biography of Dickinson.[viii] If you will just go and read that bio, it will save me a lot of explaining for next time.
So both Dickinson and Whitman worked from scraps of paper, saving everything that swam into their ken. Dickinson bound her poems into fascicles, and appears to have been fairly fastidious in how she handled her notes and mss. and poems. There are no photographs known of her in her study — her bedroom, where she worked, apparently. She probably wouldn’t have allowed any. We do know that Whitman was less fastidious. There is a famous photo, among the many of him that survive, showing Whitman late in life, in his bedroom in Camden surrounded by his scraps of paper, his manuscript sources. This is apparently a candid photo, taken by one “Dr. William Reeder, Philadelphia,” a visitor, and is a bit hazy, as you can see (the website’s note on the photo appears as a caption below it):
Taken, as was a simiilar [sic] photograph, in Whitman’s upstairs bedroom. Here the legendary chaos of papers that surrounded Whitman in his last years is visible; he likened the mass to a sea, resisted efforts of his housekeeper and friends to sort it out, and claimed that whatever he needed surfaced eventually.[ix]
So, for this last close look at Whitman, I want to examine again his process of editing — the slicing and dicing which we can so easily accomplish with keyboard and mouse. So let’s look at one of the “uncollected poems” presented in the “comprehensive reader’s edition” of Leaves of grass:
Light and Air!
Nothing ugly can be disgorged —
Nothing corrupt or dead set before them,
But it becomes translated or enclothed
Into the supple youth or a dress of living richness
spring gushing out from under the roots of an old tree
barn-yard, pond, yellow-jagged bank with white pebblestones
timothy, sassafras, grasshopper, pismire, rail-fence
rye, oats, cucumbers, musk-melons, pumpkin-vine, long string of running blackberry
regular sound of the cow crunching the grass —
the path worn in the grass — katy-did, locust, tree-toad, robin — wren — [x]
The editors, Sculley and Bradley, say, in their footnote to this poem: “Given its own title by the poet, this composition is in effect a complete poem; and although the last six lines do not begin with capitals, their line structure is unmistakable.[xi]” So far, so good. They go on: “The references to pismire, wren, running blackberry, and cow crunching the grass relate the piece to lines 664-668, sec. 31 of ‘Song of Myself,’”[xii] and we’ll compare this poem to those lines a little later. But this is where Sculley and Bradley go wrong, according to Matt Miller; they go on to say “but its theme is closer to the poem ‘This Compost,’ a resemblance accented by the fact that in Bucke’s transcript, it is preceded by a line not now in the MS: Under this rank coverlid stretch the corpses of young men.”[xiii]
Writing in Collage of myself, Matt Miller traces through several manuscripts the development of an image from the section “I celebrate myself” of the first edition of Leaves of grass, a section in later editions called “Song of Myself.” Miller is considering a manuscript leaf which shows Whitman’s editorial process in action. He says: “The passage is important enough to quote in full”[xiv] and proceeds to transcribe the leaf, thus:
25
tr
*And to me each minute of the night and day is chock with
*****something as vital and visible vital live as flesh is
insert in here page 34 — And I say the stars are not echoes
And I perceive that the salt marsh sedgy weed has delicious refreshing
*****odors;
And potatoes and milk afford a fit breakfast dinner of state,
And I dare not say guess the the bay mare is less than I chipping bird
*****mocking bird sings as well as I, because although she reads no
newspaper; never learned the gamut;
And to shake my friendly right hand governors and millionaires
*****shall stand all day, waiting their turns.
And on to me each acre of the earth land and sea, I behold exhibits to
*****me perpetual unending ^ marvellous pictures;
They fill the worm-fence, and lie on the heaped stones, and are
*****hooked to the elder and poke-weed;
And to me each every minute of the night and day is filled with a
***** [illegible] joy.
And ^to me the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses is an a
*****every statue ^perfect and plumb; grouped.
[illegible line][xv]
This is the recto of a leaf on which Whitman was writing a schematic for Leaves of grass, which was apparently written as the first edition was being set in type — which says nothing of the dating of the leaf. The number 25 may be a page number or a section number; but it seems to indicate that this leaf came from an extensive exercise in drafting the poem. Though he can’t firmly date the leaf, Miller does say that “Taken as a whole, nothing like this passage ever appeared in Leaves of Grass, but if it still seems strangely familiar there is good reason,”[xvi] and proceeds to show how nearly every line appears someplace in the poem, mostly in various parts of “I celebrate myself.” He then goes into other leaves of Whitman’s mss. which seem to show even earlier attempts at celebrating himself, and here’s where we get back to “Light and Air!”
You will recall that Blodgett and Bradley had included this poem from a transcript by someone surnamed Bucke of one of Whitman’s manuscripts. After discussing the image of the cow crunching grass, Miller comes to the ms. leaf that is the origin of “Light and Air!” By now he’s back about three manuscript generations, and in introducing this next transcription he says “the manuscript background of these lines can be traced back to yet another, apparently earlier version. A misunderstood manuscript from the Trent Collection at Duke University reveals Whitman’s further efforts to use some of this same material.”[xvii] The misunderstanding is Blodgett and Bradley’s, says Miller, both in mistaking an insertion for a title, and in accepting Richard Maurice Bucke’s description and transcription of it published in 1899. After excoriating their scolarship perhaps unnecessarily, Miller says “Here is an accurate transcription:
The nightly magic ofl Light and air!
Nothing ugly is ^can be disgorged — brought ^¶Nothing corrupt or dead set
before them,
But it shall [deletion, illegible] surely becomes translated or enclothed
Into supple youth or dr a dress of surpassing living richness
spring gushing out from under the roots of an old tree
barn-yard, pond, yellow-jagged bank with white pebblestones
*****timothy, sassafras, grasshopper, pismire, rail-fence
rye, oats, cucumbers, musk-melons, pumpkin-vine,
long string of running blackberry —
*****regular ^sound of the cow crunching, crunching the grass —
the path ^worn in the grass — katy-did, locust, tree-toad,
robin — wren”[xviii]
You can see why Bucke might have transcribed it as a stand-alone poem, and why Blodgett and Bradley might have accepted his transcription, especially if they could not examine the manuscript for themselves. Miller, however, sees in it a continuity not only of Whitman’s restless revisions, but of his lifelong thematic preoccupations — of which the cow crunching was one. He dates it earlier than any of the other mss. with the line about the crunching cow, because the cow is an afterthought, put in to alliterate with the sound of crunching. Miller admits that his dating is somewhat conjectural — of all these leaves of manuscript. But he also contends, perhaps for the first time, that Whitman was an aural poet — that all of his collage was working towards what he wanted to hear.
But here is Miller’s main point: this is how Whitman put all this together in the first edition of Leaves of grass:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’ouvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer girl
*****boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking shortcake.[xix]
As you can see, the final version — although that term is ironic in light of Whitman’s penchant for revision — is stronger than the earlier versions. But what that strength demonstrates is that Whitman finally understood what he had been blindly groping after, his line of verse.
But hold on, I hear you say — how does that differ from Emily Dickinson — or any poet, for that matter —
Your turn.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym, accessed on 29 June 2015.
[ii] The illustrated heritage dictionary and information book. — Boston : Houghton Mifflin, c1977, entry for “couth,” which lists the etymology as “Middle English couth, familiar, known, Old English cūth. See gnō in appendix”, which ties it in with gnosis.
[iii] Ibid., entry for “want”.
[iv] Ibid., entry for “dear,” and you cannot but have noticed some circularity in that definition.
[v] Ibid., entry for “dearth”.
[vi] There is an electronic manuscript project underway for Dickinson similar to the Walt Whitman Archive, which does not seem to be related to the above website; you can check it out at http://www.edickinson.org. As with the Whitman archive, the reproductions of the mss. are superb.
[vii] Final harvest : Emily Dickinson’s poems / selection and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson. – Boston : Little, Brown, c1961, p. xi, wherein Johnson cites his own Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography (1955), pages 84-86 for a detailed discussion.
[viii] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson, accessed 30 June 2015; it occurs about halfway down the web-page.
[ix] Both photo and caption are taken from http://www.whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/gallery.html, accessed 30 June 2015;
[x] Leaves of grass / Walt Whitman. – Comprehensive reader’s edition / edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. – New York : Norton, 1968. Pages 652-653.
[xi] Ibid., p. 652.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid., pp. 652-3.
[xiv] Collage of myself : Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of Grass / Matt Miller. — Lincoln and London : University of Nebraska Press, c2010, p. 60.
[xv] Ibid., p. 55. In this transcription, to accommodate WordPress, the line indents are achieved by 5 white asterisks, as WordPress does not do tabs. In addition, the underlined and overlined superscript and subscript characters, respectively, should be strikeouts.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 56.
[xvii] Ibid., pp. 59-60.
[xviii] Ibid., p. 61. Again, in this transcription, to accommodate WordPress, the line indents are achieved by 5 white asterisks, as WordPress does not do tabs.
[xix] Ibid., pp. 58-59. Again, in this transcription, the line indents are achieved by 5 white asterisks.