November 4, 2007

• “…and I following her just the same”

  What I like about Walt Whitman is his way of writing about people — he was color-blind, gender-blind, class-blind.  He was the self-proclaimed “American poet” (in the mid-1800s), who really believed that all people were created equal, and this conviction came through in his collection of poems Leaves of Grass. 

  Here’s an example from one of my favorite segments “Children of Adam.”  Here he puts himself in the perspective of Adam… (my interpretation in parentheses beside his lines– please leave a comment if you can give further insight to these lines of poetry)

  To The Garden The World

  TO the garden the world anew ascending, (the world is beginning)
  Potent mates,
  daughters, sons, preluding, (the time before procreation/children)
  The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and
  being, (revel in the gift of Life)
  Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber, (Adam, awake from his sleep sees Eve for the first time)
  The revolving
  cycles in their wide sweep having brought me
       again,
  Amorous, mature,
  all beautiful to me, all wondrous, (Adam is full of love & ardor)
  My limbs and the quivering fire that ever
  plays through them,
       for reasons, most wondrous, (sexual desire for Eve)
  Existing I peer and
  penetrate still, (gazing upon her beauty–and perhaps sexual union?)
  Content with the present, content with the past, (everything was “very good”)
  By my
  side or back of me Eve following, (Adam & Eve as equals, side by side, her following…
  Or in front, and I following her just the
  same. (or Eve in front, him following, it’s just the same — a picture of equality — a picture of how God planned it to be for man and woman, husband and wife).

  —I love this little insight into what it might’ve been like for Adam & Eve in a world that was just ascending.  The next segment, “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers” is even better. 

  • 8:14 pm
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