Look for me under your boot-soles

Song of Myself, LII
Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

To emanate, to heal through attention and affection

"When he (Walt Whitman, the poet) was in the city he went to Campbell Hospital to visit 'a couple of Brooklyn boys' from his brother's regiment. About a hundred wounded men lay in a long shed with whitewashed walls. Whitman stopped to try to comfort a boy who was groaning with pain. 'I talked to him some time'. Whitman wrote to his sister. 'He seemed to have entirely given up, and lost heart  - he had not a cent of money - not a friend or acquaintance.'

Discovering that no one had examined the boy since he was brought in, Whitman went and found a doctor. He sat on the bedside and wrote out a letter that the young man dictated to his family. 'The boy said he would like to buy some milk from a woman who came through the ward each afternoon, and Whitman gave him the change in his pocket. 'Trifling as this was, he was overcome and began to cry'.

This serendipitous encounter drew on so many elements of Whitman's personality that he soon abandoned his plans to return to New York. It not only touched his sympathy and generosity but gave him a chance to 'emanate' - to heal through attention and affection - and to fulfill one of his roles as a poet, committing to paper the speech of the illiterate boy.

He began to visit the hospitals daily. He wrote to friends in Boston and New York soliciting contributions so he could buy things for the soldiers, and soon he had settled into the routine that was to last all through the war - living in a rented room, working three or four hours a day at odd jobs, and visiting the hospitals."

Page 207, 'A Draft of Whitman', from 'The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World' by Lewis Hyde

Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk...

"You have not known what you are — you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life;
Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time;
What you have done returns already in mockeries;
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their
return?)

The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you;
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if
these
conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me....."

Excerpt from 'To You', Walt Whitman

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you...

To a Stranger
Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Never

"...The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirmed case,
He will never sleep anymore as he did, in the cot in his mother's bedroom..."


'Song of Myself', Walt Whitman

Notebook: 1986-87