"Out of Hopeful Green Stuff Woven"

I am in a Whitman kind of mood today - expansive, contemplative, savoring a dish of hope seasoned with a touch of melancholy.   

Perhaps for me there is also a leavening of nostalgia, both in its original meaning of the pangs of homecoming and also the yearning for an irretrievable past.  I get this way as the seasons turn, and more so this Spring as I turn 40.  There are other, outer reasons to feel like this now, as we look forward to my Grandmother's memorial service this summer and work toward a conservation outcome for the land our family is privileged to share.

This picture of me taken ten summers ago with my cousin's daughter Charlotte brought "Leaves of Grass" to mind, and one passage in particular that seems worth reproducing in full.

"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier."

-  Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Better to have this long view, to have a disposition of hopeful green stuff woven.  I watch my own children stretch and grow like vigorous young shoots, leaves unfurled and reaching for the sky.  I feel my toes grip the ground more tenaciously, the fixed foot to their widening arcs - but that metaphor belongs to another poet, and one who also forbids mourning:

"If they be two, they are two so                                           
    As stiff twin compasses are two ; 
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show 
    To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit, 
    Yet, when the other far doth roam,                                 
It leans, and hearkens after it, 
    And grows erect, as that comes home."

Comments

[Terry Thornton]

Greenman,

Rejoice on your 40th year! And when, thirty years from now you turn seventy, remember that you were told, "REJOICE on being Forty!"

I enjoyed your post --- and the two poems fragments very much. It is my hope, however, that everyone will follow your link and read the last four lines of Donne.

Terry Thornton