Unity with Nature

IX.-Unity with Nature

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he be

came,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass and white and red morning glories and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pondside,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water plants, with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him.

It is a surprise to the student of Walt Whitman to find that with all his unusual interests, he is perhaps most excellent, after all, in the realm common to poets generally—the description and interpretation of nature.

Mere admiration of natural beauty does not satisfy. All the world about in its every aspect, he believes is unconsciously absorbed

and assimilated into each life from the earliest moments and later should be consciously received into the inmost soul as a large part of its richest experience.

It seems scarcely possible that even Wordsworth's word brush has painted more exquisite pictures of nature's life and growth, color and sound than Whitman has left us.

His words in these pictures are chosen with rare originality and perfect discrimination. But even in the abundance of his nature work, man is never forgotten. The human soul is always the center. It is nature as man sees it-nature as it reacts in spiritual interpretation-never nature for itself alone.

Before the fitting man all Nature yields.

This extract from the "Song of Myself," though less beautiful than many of his later passages, is unique and inspiring:

To behold the daybreak —

The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows.

The air tastes good to my palate;

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising, freshly exuding,

Scooting obliquely high and low.

Something I can not see puts upward libidinous prongs; Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the sun-rise would

kill me,

If I could not now and always send the sun-rise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun;
We found our own, O my soul, in the calm and cool of
the daybreak.

The sun is a favorite object of his adoration. He invokes it thus in the opening of a series of his later poems:

Thou orb aloft full dazzling! thou hot October sun!
Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand,
The sibilant near sea with vistas far and foam,
And tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue;
O sun of noon, refulgent! my special word to thee,

Thou that with fructifying heat and light,

O'er myriad farms, o'er lands and waters, North and

South,

O'er all the globe that turns its face to thee shining in

space;

Thou that impartially infoldest all, not only continents,

seas;

Thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally,

Shed, shed thyself on mine and me, with but a fleeting ray out of thy million millions.

Strike through these chants,

Nor only launch thy subtle dazzle and thy strength for these.

Prepare the later afternoon of me myself — prepare my lengthening shadows,

Prepare my starry nights.