Notable Quote: Walt Whitman

Well, Walt Whitman has been on my mind this week.  He was such a good soul.  He never had an unkind word for people, even those he opposed.  He embraced all people, even those from the South, though he was staunchly against slavery and supported the Union as a nurse to the wounded during the Civil War.  Last year I completely read his Death-Bed edition of Leaves of Grass, all 500 plus pages.  Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was his great work that he kept republishing with additional poems.  I think there were up to nine editions of publications, with the concluding edition dubbed "The Death-Bed" edition because it went into publication just prior to Whitman's death.  With each addition Whitman added and revised the poems, but unfortunately not all the revisions were improvements.  Sometimes the original poem is superior.  What I really like about Whitman was how he embraced humanity.  He loved everyone.


The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Walt Whitman

In his life time he was not appreciated.  That really disappointed him.  He loved the United States, and you can see that in many of his poems.  He was consciously the poet of America, embracing the land, the people, the life-style of his day, and most importantly the particular English language we call the American language.  He did for the American language what Shakespeare did for British English and Dante did for Italian.  He became our national poet.  It took a while, but after his death the country did embrace him as he embraced the country.

By the way, he was frequently photographed in his lifetime.  There are lots of great photos of him.  It was hard to pick one.

Poetry: "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" by Walt Whitman

Today April 14^th is, if I did my arithmetic correctly, the 148^th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  That factoid, coupled with Jeanette, my fellow blogger at J’s Café Nette, writing  about her lilac in a recent blog  made me think of the poem I always think of this time of year, Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”  Normally the poem would come to me on its own, since I can’t help recall it when I see my mother’s dwarf lilac in bloom.  However this year it seems to be blooming late up here.  It’s been a cool spring and things are behind.  No perfuming blossoms yet, so the poem was out of mind until Jeanette mentioned it.

You may know that the poem was written on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination .  Whitman had developed a profound love of Lincoln since he caught a glimpse of him in Washington in 1861, totally gave of himself during the Civil War as a nurse to aid the wounded Union soldiers, and when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 suffered a most profound despair.  He wrote this poem as an elegy for the fallen leader.

 The poem is nearly nine pages long in my Leaves of Grass (Whitman’s opus of all his poetry) edition, so I’m not going to quote the entire piece.  I’ll highlight the major moments and try to give you an appreciation of its greatness.  But you can read the entire poem at my favorite poetry site, PoetryFoundation. 

 Whitman is not a difficult poet to comprehend.  For the most part he tells you exactly what he means to convey.  His symbols are usually not multifaceted.  His genius is in his language, rhythm, and imagery.  The poem is divided into 16 stanzas with the usual Whitman free verse of irregular meter and irregular line length.  Whitman is not big on formality.  Let’s start with the first stanza.

1 WHEN lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,	5
And thought of him I love.

An elegy is a poem of a fallen hero with an appeal for eternal remembrance.  Lincoln is the great star Whitman is quite explicit about it in the second stanza, and lilacs will be eternally returning at the same time of year in remembrance.  Throughout the poem there is a religious undertone that suggests Lincoln to be a Christ-figure whose sacrificial death brings new life to the nation.  And so Whitman collects the bloom, the star, and his love into a “trinity.” 

 

Let’s look at the next three stanzas:

 

2 O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!	10
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
3 In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,	15
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
4 In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,	20
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die).

 
In the second stanza, Whitman connects Lincoln to the star and his emotional connection.  In the third he fleshes out the lilac bush, pointing out the heart-shaped leaf, suggesting love, and ending with a very suggestive broken sprig.  In the fourth stanza he introduces a new character, a shy little bird singing.  From other Whitman poems, the little thrush is a stand-in for the poet himself, and even here it’s not so subtle.  The bird “sings by himself a song,” which echoes Whitman’s famous poem “Song of Myself.”

 
Stanzas five and six dramatizes the journey of Lincoln’s coffin from Washington to Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois, a procession across the nation which actually happened.  Whitman ends the procession with offering that sprig of lilac he broke to the coffin as people tend to throw flowers into an open grave.  In stanzas seven and eight Whitman consecrates the death as a sacred death, that Lincoln’s life and now death was connected to something beyond earth, divine providence.  That is why Whitman chooses the falling star to symbolize Lincoln.

 

Stanzas nine and ten he returns to the singing bird, wondering how he shall sing for the fallen man.  What Whitman decides on is to let the bird sing of the nation, all it’s varied elements.  In stanzas 11, 12, and 13 he sings of farms and hills and a flowing river, then to Manhattan with its spires, and then to swamps and prairies.  The song—the death song—is knitting the nation together, as the tragic death of a president can do. 

And then we come to what I think is the climatic stanza, fourteen.  Let me cite it all.

 

14 Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,	110
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty (after the perturb’d winds and the storms),
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,	115
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.	120
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,	125
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,	130
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.	135
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,	140
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?	145
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,	150
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.	155
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,	160
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

 

Here the land, the houses, the streets, the sea all come into the song of death, into “the sacred knowledge of death.”  Here while holding hands with his companions Whitman meets “the receiving night that talks not,” or in different words, the universal providence.  The word “companion” is nicely chosen too.  It was originally a religious word, its Latin origin “com pane,” with bread, or members of the Christian union of Christ’s breaking of bread.  The italics in the poem are the bird’s actual voice, and it’s a prayer almost in the form of St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun.”  This little section is so beautiful: “Prais’d be the fathomless universe,/For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,/And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!”

 

In stanza 15 the song alludes to the nation’s recent history of strife and war.  And finally let’s end with stanza 16 where by Lincoln’s death and through the rising birdsong the poet, and by implication, the nation now goes forward with heaven’s blessing.

 

16 Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,	190
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.	195
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,	200
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,	205
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

 

Whitman ends it with lilac, star, and bird, forever caught within his soul.  A truly inspired poem.

Personal Story: Mama’s Finger

Let’s start with my mother being seventy-nine.  She’s a strong seventy-nine, but still she’s actually closer to her eightieth birthday than the one she just passed.  She has slowed down since her hip replacement from four years ago, but still she gardens and walks, and now that my brother has been away she’s living alone.  Living alone actually gives her less to do because when my brother and his wife are at her house, she cooks and cleans for them as if she was forty years old and they were teenagers.  She’s one of those tireless Italian ladies that just need to be doing something.

She lives about a half mile from my house.  I stop there every day on my way home from work, just for five or ten minutes to make sure everything is OK.  In the spring and summer she’s usually in the back gardening, and sometimes digging trenches and moving buckets of dirt.  Half the time I shake my head and ask her why.  She just does.  Sometimes after digging a trench where rain puddles up, she’ll redo it if she doesn’t feel like it came out right.  Some of our biggest arguments are over what I see as meaningless heavy labor.  She’s incorrigible.  She’ll tell me this will be the last time and I find out she did it again any way.  Or I just catch her at it.

I stopped there last Thursday and no one answered the door.  I knocked and rang the bell for ten minutes.  The side of the house was nicely raked with dirt turned over.  I used my cell phone to call.  I heard her phone ring.  Still there was no answer.  I keep her keys, and so decided to open the door.  I did and called inside.  No answer.  At her age I worry about her collapsing and either being unconscious or incapacitated.  I went through each room and she wasn’t anywhere to be found.  I sighed. 

The next possibility is she walked about a mile away to where the commercial street resides.  There she could have gone to several stores.  Under typical conditions she would have planned walking there and being home at the time I normally get home from work.  But there have been a few times where she didn’t plan that well and was out.  Those times I drove toward that commercial boulevard and found her walking along the way.  She would be grateful for the ride home.  So I drove and didn’t come across her.  I drove back and didn’t see her.  I stopped back in her house—nothing.  I drove back toward the boulevard again and this time I stopped at the little supermarket where she might be.  I walked through every aisle—nothing.  I gave up.  I called my wife (at this point I was late for home) and told her what had happened and that I was on my way home.  I got about a block when my cell phone rang. 

“Are you Maria _____’s son?” asked the voice.

“Yes.  Where is she?”

“The Emergency Room at Staten Island University Hospital.”

 

“What?  What happened? ”

“Don’t worry.  No need to get worried.  She fell.”

“How is she?”

“Don’t get alarmed.  It’s scratches and bruises and a dislocated finger.  When can you get here?”

“I’ll be right there.  Ten, fifteen minutes.”

I called my wife and told her I was headed straight there, raced over.   The Emergency Room was packed and they had beds in the aisles, and I found her in a bed in an aisle.  She looked rather comfortable laying there.  Her right hand was wrapped and she held it up.  The doctor was happy to see me.  My mother doesn’t speak enough English to really understand everything.  I guess they understood her since communication of pain is rather easy.  She had been there at least three hours.

So what happened?  She had been raking the backyard and needed to put down grass seed.  She had walked to that commercial boulevard to the hardware store and bought grass seed.  When she was just a few blocks from home she just fell.  She’s not sure why, but she fell forward catching herself with her hands and apparently also taking the blow with her chest.  A couple living nearby saw her fall, tried to help her up, but decided to call an ambulance.  They even checked up on her at the hospital. 

Her chest hurt all the way around.  They did an EKG and chest x-rays.  Her heart was fine and no ribs were broken.  She had scratches and bruises on her hands and legs.  The tips of several of her exposed fingers had band-aids.  She was grateful (with a weird sort of pride) that she did not scratch or hurt her face.  Her right hand had a splint with bloody bandages.  The doctor said she dislocated at the mid knuckle.  She came in with the finger bent in the middle literally at a right angle outward.  Yikes.  They had straightened it, and now they were going to stick it back into the knuckle.  When they unwrapped it I squirmed, especially my face.  The finger was swollen double the size, the color of the skin looked pale grey, and there was a slit down the inside that you could see into the finger.  The doctor shoved the front half of the finger into the back half.  It wasn’t going in right, so they needed to do it several times.  Finally they got it in, then x-rayed again, and then when they were happy, stitched the gaping wound. 

They finally let her out around eight o’clock with a follow up with a hand surgeon.  As I helped her with her coat, which had been lying on the hospital bed beside her, I noticed a plastic shopping bag that was underneath the coat.  I looked in the bag and it was a big bag of grass seed.  LOL!  She still had the bag all this time, ambulance ride and all.  The white plastic was smeared with blood. 

You would think that would be the end of the story, but no.  I checked in on her the next day, and there she was in the backyard, smeared with dirt, her right hand full of bandages and inside a plastic bag to prevent it from getting dirty.  “What the hell are you doing?” I screamed.  “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”  “I had to get the seed down,” she explained.  “It’s going to rain tomorrow.”  And then she asked me to help her with her ice pack.  We walked inside and she sat down.  I assumed she had an ice pack inside the bag around her hand.  But she lifted her pants leg up and had a wrap with ice around her calf. 

“Is it swollen?” she asked. 

It was slightly swollen.  “What happened here?”

“A dog bit me.”

“What?” 

“A little dog.  It bit me.”  She extended her arm and with her other hand showed the length of the dog to be from her fingertips to the mid forearm.  “A little dog.  No bigger than a rat.  It bit me?”

“Where was this?  In front of the house?”

“No.”

So here’s what happened.  She walked back to the spot where she had fallen the day before.  For what reason, God knows.  To see if her blood was still there?  To see if there was something in the sidewalk that caused her to fall?  She really didn’t have an answer.  While she was looking at the concrete floor at the very spot she fell this little dog on a leash, possibly on one of those extendable leashes, squirted up around her leg and bit her calf.  At the very spot she fell…LOL. 

The dog’s owner was apologetic and what-not.  But here she was now with a swollen leg and two little fang piercings.  My first thought was, do I need to take her to the hospital?  I was pretty sure she had a tetanus shot in the last ten years, but could the dog possibly be rabid?  Given the dog was with the owner and on a leash, I figured it was fairly unlikely it was rabid.  I did not want to go to the hospital again.  I put an antiseptic on the bite marks, put a band-aid on that, and wrapped the ice pack again.  I looked at her.  “What is going on with you?”  I had my hands up, almost appealing to God.  She had an embarrassed smirk on her face.  “I don’t know.”

So in the last week we met with the hand surgeon and she will need an operation on the finger.  The front part of the finger won’t stay correctly.  He will have to put pins in and reconstruct (I think) the tendons.  The operation will be on the 17^th.  But since then we’ve had pre-op testing, medical clearences from her general doctor and from a cardiologist.  Oy vey.

 Here's a picture of my mother in her garden from several years ago.  As you can see, she's into her gardening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Faith Filled Friday: "Hiding Place" by John Michael Talbot

It's been such a hard week.  Besides working late and taking work home, work has been a drag.  And then at the end of last week my mother broke and dislocated her finger, which will require an operation.  So it's been hectic and busy and stressful.  Through it all I have one hiding place.

I love this song, and I love most of John Michael Talbot's music.  If you've never heard his music, here's his home page, and I know you can sample a lot of it on Youtube.  I think he looks better with the shorter hair and beard, but I guess that sort of thing doesn't matter to him.  ;)

Music Tuesday: "Gloria" from Bach's Mass in B Minor

I can never make up my mind on who's the greatest composer between Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.  I guess it depends which one's work has been in my ear.  Leading up to Easter our local classical radio station, WQXR, 105.9 FM, presented Bach's complete works in about ten days of play time, calling the event Bach 360.  I had been sick of talk radio ever since the election, and so I've had WQXR on in the car.  During the Bach 360, every time I got in the car it felt like I was in heaven.  I love Johann Sebastian Bach. 

Here is his Gloria in excelsis from his Mass in B Minor.  Now I don't know why a German Lutheran would write a mass in Latin.  Honestly I know very little about the Lutheran liturgy, but if the Mass in B Minor is any indication, it appears to have a very similar form as the in the Latin rite.  Hope you enjoy this piece of heaven.

Director: Karl Richter and the Munich Opera Bach Orchestra

Matthew Monday: Class Switch

This needs a little preface.  Matthew had been in a class (pre-pre-school) of three year olds that was mostly boys.  I think it was four or five other boys and one girl.  I don’t know if that fact is very significant.  Perhaps the fact that the teacher did not seem to control the class that well is much more significant.  I visited the class once and was totally not impressed of her presence or command of the class.  As far as I could tell from that one hour there was not much structure.  The kids raced about and played with whatever they took, possession being the rule as to who got to play with what.  I could sense that could lead to problems, but it didn’t while I was there, and I don’t think that is the root of the current problem either.   It was a sign, though.

Don’t get me wrong.  It wasn’t a bad class.  The teacher, Miss Melissa, is young, dressed rather common that day, probably isn’t paid that much for this level, but the kids were happy.  Matthew has been in the class since August (I think) and the kids are all friends.  They are rambunctious and Matthew picked up some bad manners at first.  But the kids all hug each other.  I’m not sure how much he’s learned, but I’m not sure how much he’s supposed to have learned at this level.  He knew his ABC’s and numbers already, and I’d have to say now he’s infallible with them.  Other than improving on what he already knew, I don’t know what exactly he’s learned.

A few weeks ago Miss Melissa said that she thought Matthew was going to be a perfectionist, not so much as a compliment, but just because he insists on doing things himself.  He’ll start doing it and then, when it doesn’t turn out as quite it should, he wants to move on to something else.  He gets frustrated.  Then we were told his writing of the alphabet (calligraphy) was behind the other kids, and he didn’t want to do it anymore.  He was refusing.  Now the other kids are all I think in class five days a week, full days.  This amounts to day care for them while the parents work.  Matthew is only there three days a week for half days.  Obviously he’s not going to be at the other kid’s level. 

And then last week we were told that Matthew doesn’t want to do the school projects.  The school projects amount to gluing things together as a little craft.  When he gets frustrated and stops he starts to cry.  He told my wife last week that the other kids call him “cry baby.”  My wife verified this with the teacher, and she said they do.  Something was going on because it reached a point where Matthew on Tuesday was refusing to go to school altogether.  Wednesday he was crying when my wife dropped him off.  She spoke to the administrator and asked he go into another class. 

I was reluctant to make the switch.  After all Matthew has to learn how to deal with different types, and he’s got to toughen up.  He can’t quit just because he’s called names.  Thursday he was put into another class with fewer boys.    The following are email exchanges I had with my wife.

From: Mrs. Manny
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 9:35 AM
To: Manny
Subject: Matthew

Matthew actually looked forward to going to school this morning. Brought him to his new classroom and right away you can tell how mellow it is compared to his other class. He gave me no problem at all, not even a whine. Gave me a kiss and off he went to play. His new teacher Miss Vicki is the total opposite of Miss Melissa. Even Vicki told me that the boys in Melissa's class are a rough bunch.

I'll know more when I pick him up later.

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From: Manny
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 10:57 AM
To: Mrs. Manny
Subject: RE: Matthew (UNCLASSIFIED)

Thanks.

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From: Mrs. Manny
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 1:29 PM
To: Manny
Subject: Matthew

Today went very well. Matthew likes his new class and teacher. When his new teacher asked him if he wanted to stay in her class Matthew responded with a yes and gave her a hug.

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From: Manny
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 01:31 PM
To: Mrs. Manny
Subject: RE: Matthew (UNCLASSIFIED)

Sounds like you made a good decision.

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Let’s hope it’s all resolved.    

Faith Filled Friday: "Divine Mercy Flood My Soul"

This coming Sunday is Divine Mercy Sunday.  This song is just too moving to not post for the occaision.  Annie Karto has such a delicately beautiful voice. 

Divine Mercy Flood My Soul

by Annie Karto

I knelt before Him one stormy night
His Face was adorned in a golden light
I felt so unworthy, I want to run and hide
But His gaze was so intense I felt paralyzed

Divine Mercy
like a river, oh, flood my soul
wash me clean, and make me whole
Divine Mercy
like a river, oh, flood my soul
wash me clean, and make me whole

I found the lyrics here, if you wish to read the rest of them.