Birth & Origin
-Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems (pg. 2).
-Always the procreant urge of the world (pg. 2).
-And that all the men ever born are also my brothers...and the women my sisters and lovers (pg. 4).
-Or I guess the grass is itself a child...the produced babe of the vegetation (pg. 4).
-It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps (pg. 4).
-Has any one supposed it lucky to be born (pg. 5).
-I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe...and am not contained between my hat and boots (pg. 5).
-For me children and the begetters of children (pg. 5).
-What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes (pg. 6).
-The one-year wife is recovering and happy, a week ago she bore her first child (pg. 10).
-The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing (pg. 10).
-Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy (pg. 16).
-And of the threads that connect the stars -- and of wombs (pg. 17).
-Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly (pg. 26).
-Putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of the shadows (pg. 34).
-Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety (pg. 37).
-Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid...nothing could overlay it (pg. 38).
Out of these many motifs regarding the concept of birth and origin, I shall be focusing on the following four:
1. Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems (pg. 2).
This appears in the text in the very beginning of the poem when he is asking the reader to join him in his growth. Before saying this, he asks if the reader has “reckoned a thousand acres much” or “reckoned the earth much.” Whitman is in a sense asking the reader to thus “reckon” or take his poem into deep consideration because, in doing so the reader shall have an understanding of all poems.
2. Or I guess the grass is itself a child...the produced babe of the vegetation (pg. 4).
This one is sort of self-explanatory. In the poem Whitman has just had the discussion with the child about the grass, and this is one of his seven interpretations of what the grass could possibly be. By saying the grass is a child itself, he is using a kind of circular reasoning; the grass knows nothing yet is all, the child knows nothing yet in his absence of knowledge there is a discrete layer of wisdom to be found.
3. Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly (pg. 26).
Leading up to this particular sentence in the poem, Whitman is speaking of his travels and describes multiple (real or possibly unreal) instances, and towards the end of his purposefully meandering this line arrives. I believe it touches upon the same type of circular reasoning I mentioned above, the child and the mother are one, and the crescent child (just like the crescent moon) is growing literally while the mother grows metaphorically as they carry each other along in the world.
4. Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid...nothing could overlay it (pg. 38).
In this part of the poem it seems like Whitman is talking about his own creation, and how it came to be that he views the world in such a fluid manner. The lines themselves imply that he was a part of life before he was able to breathe, and even in the womb his embryo was in constant motion and never fell pray to stagnation or consumption.
By using motifs that revolve around birth, growth and the origin of things, Whitman is able to more than adequately articulate and fluidly combine his themes regarding nature, the poet and the self. Birth is the beginning of life, and quite frankly it is the uniting factor in all of nature and mankind. Consciousness or the lack there of, is what often separates man from nature, but through his metaphors concerning comprehension prior to consciousness, one may draw the parallel he is making between life and death, stagnation and elasticity. Whitman seems to be feeding off the idea that there is a kind of life before birth, and in an even larger context he may be implying that quite often there are times in which the origin of something may be a secondary happening, and therefore may represent an insufficient understanding of an ultimate beginning.
In regards to Whitman’s aspirations, it becomes clear that he is concerned with the beginning of things just as much as their end, and he believes that to truly understand anything one must understand where the creation of their thoughts began. That is to say, Whitman became conscious of his thoughts in the womb, because his subconscious was too powerful to fall victim to submission. However, in reality Whitman is simply implying that stagnation can mark your destination if you so allow it to, but continuous growth and the pursuit of knowing may grant you the ability to be reborn and rediscovered each and every day.
Excellent! The "womb" is the "origin" and W is always trying to grasp the "aboriginal" . . . at the same time, as you point out, all is cycle in W, so the "womb," while important, is technically only one moment in the whole cycle and hence not really an origin . . . paradoxical or something . . .
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