Critics have long puzzled over the cluster of poems–“By the Roadside”–that Whitman tucks just ahead of his Drum-Taps. This cluster comes directly after after the “Sea-Drift” cluster, which includes some of the most famous poems of crisis and recovery that Whitman would ever write, include “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.” These poems model desperate attempt at creating some form of union in light of an encroaching sense of death and division.
Rather than being similarly desperate and dramatic, however, the poems in “By the Roadside” can seem a bit, well, sleepy. Focusing on one of the three poems we read from this cluster (“As I Sit and Look Out,” “A Hand-Mirror,” 0r “To the States), discuss how you think it serves as a bridge from the readings we have done from the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and the Civil War poems that will soon take center stage. Are they uniquely fitting poems in this position, or do they seem strange failures?
Rather than being “sleepy,” I see these poems more resigned. Whitman refers to himself as “silent” at the end of “I Sit and Look Out” even though he is seeing all of these terrible things happening. Even after “Leaves of Grass” and Whitman’s struggle, and rare triumph, with himself, love and the world, it makes sense that he is a bit exhausted in wrestling with the bigger picture of life. He writes, “I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish/ with themselves, remorseful after deeds done” furthering his exploration and failures in trying to find himself. It makes sense that after going through all of this, he is now transitioning into Civil War poems. I don’t see these poems as failures, I just see them as transitions into a new era, maybe a “sleepier” era but a new one nonetheless. I think it would have felt less natural if he went from the desperate and dramatic pieces right into the Civil War poems without having transitions like so. In “I Sit and Look Out” he is describing all of the ways that humans have failed and how they continue to fail each other. It is almost like he is setting the stage for an even bigger war that is to come.
While these poems may not be as flashy as his previous ones, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them sleepy. They are more reserved in terms of their explicitness but I think they are still rich with tension and observations about our world. “I Sit and Look Out” sounds helpless almost in a way that is anything but sleepy. Whitman is calling our attention to terrible things that are going on around us like famine and abuse and ends with the admission that he does not attempt to do anything to fix these problems. It is intense gloom that clearly translates to the anxiety and despair over the impending civil war and massive divide of the country that Whitman was so proud of and connected to. It almost seems as though the problems the country has are personal to Whitman and he cannot divorce the two and he has trouble grappling with his own stressors just as is seen in the end of this poem.
I agree with Elie when she says that these poems are “still rich with tension and observations about our world.” Not every poem has to be hard to understand, or jam-packed with hard-to-solve riddles, or filled with abstract ideas that could mean just about anything. Sometimes the most powerful pieces are the simplest pieces. Why I can see how this group of poems can be more sleepy, I think they are just as strong as any of the others we have read.
It seems to me that the poems “A Hand-Mirror,” “I Sit and Look Out,” and “To the States,” are especially fitting for the layout of Leaves of Grass. The entire collection of poems titled “By the Roadside” appear to function as a self-evaluation given by Whitman to the American people. “Hand-Mirror” seems to be a way of having people see that the place of a slave, with their degrading bodies and low-class place in society, is inhumane and wrong, especially because slaves are so worn down now but they were not born that way! In “I Sit and Look Out,” Whitman is showing the American people who ignore the trials and hardships experienced by some, that life is hard, and that people should be more willing to change things instead of seeing, hearing, and silence. And “To the States” is Whitman’s way of getting people to question that maybe the Congressmen and Presidents are not gods and great deciders, but they are just people. That being said, the “Drum Taps” section is immediately more intense and calls for specific actions, so if one think of the “Roadside” poems as a way of Whitman getting people to think freely, and “Drum Taps” as a way to demonstrate the manifestation, or a hyperbole that of, then the poems mentioned above clearly fit into their respective places.
Whitman’s “To The States” serves as the final piece of the “By the Roadside” section and thus serves as the final say of Whitman’s thoughts about the approaching war in a way. With this poem, Whitman bridges the gap between the rest of Leaves of Grass and his civil war poems. I agree with the overall “sleepy” overtones for this section as it seems that Whitman hardly seems to care enough to strive for peace or call upon some sort of action (like he does in the “Drum-Taps” section) in the time leading up to the Civil War . By doing so, this section of poems, especially “To The States”, serves as a bridge from the “freeform” style and feeling of Leaves of Grass and the strong, almost imposing style and feeling of the “Drum-Taps” section. The sense of sleepiness in this poem is brought out by the lines “Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, / for reasons” (415). Prior to these lines, Whitman seems to critique congressmen and the president. After this short critique by questioning whether or not they are “the great Judges” (415), Whitman fails to continue to critique them or serve any sort of alternative to the issues plaguing the United States prior to the Civil War. Because of this, I believe this section of Whitman’s poems serve a bridge between Whitman’s pre-war poetry and his post-war poetry.
Whitman’s poem, “I Sit and Look Out” is so eerie and haunted me in the days after I read it. I feel strangely of Whitman’s personal confession of his being a bystander to these terrible problems in society, but I can sincerely understand hi silence. This poem reminds me of John Mayer’s song, “Waiting on the world to change,” where mayer repeats the word “waiting” over and over again. The repetition of the word “waiting” in Maye’s song is similar to the repetition “I sit,” and “I observe” and the other passive ways in which Whitman responds to what he witnesses. I don’t understand how he can say he is silent when he is writing and publishing poetry about the dark sides of humanity. I especially do not understand why he would place this poem before the more detailed accounts of his experiences in poems that follow. It would, to me, seem more powerful to place this poem after his Civil War poems because of the confessional tone and the way the poem ends with the word “silent.” The final line of this poem deserves a mic-drop, and for that reason I would place it towards the end of the Civil War poems.
These poems do make sense to me as a sort of bridge between the energetic, optimistic poems of Sea Drift and the more erratic, depressing Civil War poems. For example, just for contrast, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” from the Sea Drift section has an open and exploratory tone, almost breezy in how it jumps from question to question in time with its wandering narrator. There is an optimistic thread woven throughout the poem, captured in the line “Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return)” – the narrator has faith that the ups and down of life will faithfully ebb and flow. In contrast, “A Hand-Mirror” follows a path of decay wherein the up-and-down, ebb and flow of life is not present–just further decay. The diction is bleak, with phrases like “Lungs rotting away piecemeal” and “Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams” (408). This bleakness continues in the poems of Drum Taps, whose Civil War theme produces sometimes dispiriting poems. However, it is still reflective in the way the Sea Drift poems are–the narrator encourages analysis of the literal reflection in the titular hand-mirror, asking the speaker directly, “is it you?” (408). The reflective nature of the By the Roadside poems plus their darker thematic elements combine to form an effective bridge between the poems of Sea Drift and those of Drum Taps.
Thanks for the engaging conversation and reflection here. You all offer a number of great defenses of this section as a thematic bridge between the poems of crisis and recovery in the earlier section, and the war poems that would follow. Ivy’s meditation on “waiting” brought me back to the end of Song of Myself, which is such an expectant, eager, and earnest “waiting” for the reader. It also reminded me of the presumptuous, misogynistic “waiting” that Rae had identified in an early post on “A Woman Waits for Me” Here, waiting strikes a different tone: one that seems the opposite of presumption. Here, Whitman is not heading down the open road, or soaking in the blab of the pave, or actively consuming sights and sounds on the ferry passage. Instead, he is sitting, looking. He sees and hears. He receives. He reflects. And, for once, he is silent. He has no response. He allows crisis to sink in. I don’t think his silence is passive here–or “sleepy” as I earlier suggested in the prompt. It seems meditative, almost prayerful.
“A Hand-Mirror” strikes a remarkable contrast with Whitman’s poems of health and wellness. For him, personal health is an emblem of national health. The connection between body and body politic are always close for Whitman. That makes this startling depiction of the diseased body just before the war striking in its despair. And, just as in “As I Sit and Look Out,” Whitman has no response, no repair. This is the degraded mirror image of the 80-year-old man in “I Sing the Body Electric,” who in that poem seemed to embody a righteous republic.
And then there’s “To the States,” which note argues form an apt bridge to the Civil War poems. I love the way the concluding parenthetical seems a sort of syntactical bridge as well as Whitman moves from critique and passivity to the stirrings of action.
In relation to what we’ve read so far in “Leaves of Grass”, I see the poem “A Hand-Mirror” as somewhat of a dramatic transition. The poem moves away from different pictures of humanity that Whitman had painted in “Leaves of Grass”. Although he speaks of himself in those earlier poems in “Leaves of Grass”, he uses words that makes human potential seem boundless. Those earlier poems connect humanity to some sort of more spiritual and larger sense of being. They also make being human seem beautiful and interconnected to other natural elements. In “A Hand-Mirror”, I feel as though Whitman is focusing on the decay in humanity that he was witnessing. He plays with this through his language of actual decay. We read, “Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination, Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams, Words babble, hearing and touch callous…”. In these lines I think of the ways in which Whitman talks about health and vigor. Here, we see that he believes mankind is becoming tainted. Bodies are “clogged with abomination”, and blood circulates “…poisonous streams”. These lines paint a picture in which the human body is being destroyed by the times, and in a more symbolic way, these lines seem to say that mankind is also being tainted and destroyed. The influence seems to be reaching others through the “poisonous streams”. This poem seems to transition with the war that was affecting America. Whitman seems to see it destroying the vitality of the people. This poem seems to be Whitman talking to the people, telling them to look at themselves. He’s expressing this type of failure he’s seeing in his surroundings. In comparison to the other poems, I don’t see it as a failure. I see them as changes in Whitman’s reactions and moods towards his surroundings.