Honest Death

The crippling concept of being trapped in a moment of horror, perpetual mourning.  As Walt so eloquently states in When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, “I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring” or in other words the mourning shall not end when the moment of crises has passed.  Traumatic moments are often less traumatizing than the memories of those moments, because memories fade when we wish they wouldn’t, and persist when we wish they’d cease to exist.  Whitman seems to be acknowledging that we live in a world in constant flux where death is the only constant, and therefore he almost pities death as the “sad orb” whose diffidence he accepts as well as its definitive terror.

One should confidently be able to say that Whitman’s poem is all encompassing and could easily suffice for the suffering portrayed in the 9/11 poems.  What gives Walt’s a universal quality that the others do not necessarily possess, is the ambiguity that troubles the reader when the poem ends.  In the 9/11 poems one can fairly easily pinpoint the focal point or theme being presented, whereas in Whitman’s poem we get no concrete sense of what he’s talking about other than the fact that he is troubled by the haunting presence of death and its many complications.  However, this is not to say that one poem is more or less effective than the other when attempting to grapple with situations that we may be emotionally incapable of grasping.  One poem in particular that struck me as possessing some qualities of Walt, was “Hum” by Ann Lauterbach.  Structurally speaking the poem is nothing like that of Walt’s, but in content it embodies the notion of combing both the beautiful with the bitter, and embraces death in the way that Walt walks with the thought and knowledge of death’s sadly beautiful existence.

Whitman Blackout

So to further elaborate upon my desire to explore Specimen Days, I must clarify what it is I actually propose to do.  As I have previously stated in some of my earlier blogs, the key to understanding the essence of Walt most likely lies within his ‘journal’ for lack of a better way to describe it, which is why I intend to understand the entries to the best of my ability.  Anyway to get to the point, I think it would be interesting to create a blackout poem from two of Whitman’s writings.  For instance I will take “A Cavalry Camp” and “Some Sad Cases Yet” and from each of these I will black out certain sentences and/or words in order to create a new poem using Whitman’s words.  Essentially I will be recycling certain phrases or compelling words from his entries in an attempt to find new meanings within them.  In doing this I may be able to subliminally pick out key terms that otherwise would have been left die amongst the countless meanings and terms found within each entry.  Thus, I am hoping to extract the essence of these two writings in order to shine a new and hopefully more progressive light upon the inner workings of Whitman.