Walt Whitman as Buddhist Sage

"What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just
   as perfect,
The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable
   fluids are perfect;
Slowly and surely they have pass'd on to this, and slowly and surely
   they yet pass on." (from "To Think of Time")

The Madness Amourous

Having just seen PBS' excellent American Experience program about Walt Whitman, I thought today would be a good day for this excerpt:

The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching,
The divine list for myself or you or for any one making,
The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot, and what it arouses,
The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment,
(Hark close and still what I now whisper to you,
I love you, O you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more lawless than we).

The Tao of Walt

It's my 53rd birthday today and my gift to my readers is this passage from Leaves of Grass:

There was never more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven and hell than there is now.

This reminds me more of Eastern philosophy or spirituality (a la the Tao te Ching than the Psalms. Walt was a natural mystic as well as poet.

Battle-Flags

We come back to Whitman for the final offering for this year's National Poetry Month with an excerpt from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryards Bloom'd," his great elegy for Abraham Lincoln and the dead of the Civil War. With 100 American soldiers and countless Iraqis killed just in the last month, we should ponder Whitman's words carefully:

And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

National Poetry Month

Since April is National Poetry Month, I've decided to post some old and new favorite poems throughout the month. I don't have time to post a new one every day, but I'll try for at least 1–2 per week. To start things off, our greatest poet, Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d;
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.