wrote Song of Myself, V… one year before his death. The following words from this poem are,
“I believe in you my soul/ the other I am… must not abase itself to you.”
What timely words for today, when a man who personifies abasement has wedged himself into our heads for what has the feel (at least in mine) of an endless decade. In no way is this man abashed by who he is and what he has done throughout life. Not ashamed, remorseful, conscience-stricken, mortified, humiliated, humbled or discomfited. He is, however, red-faced; but that is cosmetic like the orange-hair, and not from being shamefaced.
I am led to poetry when the world is too much with me; and this dispirited feeling led me to Whitman by happenchance. I thought of Walt when I stared out the kitchen window last Wednesday afternoon. Looking through the glass and, in light perfectly cast outside in the garden, I saw a spider web. It was suspended out many feet from a tall Pampas grass, a plant whose many fronds reach skyward, ready to wave in any wind. ”Not the best location for a web, Charlotte,” I said.
(The famous essayist & author E.B. White was on my mind for Thursday’s second class on the Personal Essay.)
Although I could see the web and its nearby spider, any filament did not seem to be connected to anything other than the large Pampas. I went outside for a closer look. There I saw a filament attached to a knock-out rose bush. Yet outside in different light, I could not see the web. I only knew it was there because of one trapped insect of unidentified means.
One thing and another led me to “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” a Walt Whitman poem in the public domain.
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on the little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the sphere to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Next week: The mystery of creativity as our connective web
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