24 pages • 48 minutes read
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
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Themes
The Resiliency of America
Few nations survive the ravages of the kind of brutal civil war that split America when Whitman was just beginning in his self-appointed role as America’s Poet. The reality of the Civil War, which was brought home to Whitman during his stint as a volunteer nurse in Washington, grieved Whitman. With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, a man whose generosity of spirit and profound sense of cosmic consequence drew Whitman, few in the North took the Civil War as personally as Whitman. His poetry during the era, most notably the collection Drum Taps and his powerful elegies on Lincoln’s assassination (“When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain”), reflected his wounded spirit and his flagging optimism in what he had hailed in the years leading up to the war as the great American experiment.
The war is now over—in these “days of peace” (Line 1), the speaker hails the resurgence of the American experiment. He celebrates the sheer energy of a nation compelled by the spirit of invention and by its defiant confidence in its own being. The “growth of cities” and the “spread of inventions” (Line 9), widely seen at the time as indicators of how America was losing touch with its rural, pastoral identity, testify here to a nation intent on rebirth, intent on growth and evolution, intent on embracing the possibilities of the new industrial age.
Perhaps the three most important words in the poem, easily overlooked, are in the opening line: “days of peace.” America has survived its own civil strife. A scant six years after Appomattox, if the belligerent spirit of the Confederacy’s rebellion yet lingers in the deepest South, America itself refuses to be haunted, refuses to move forward into the past. America, the poet hymns, grows; America spreads, America moves, grandly and unapologetically. To an American culture where elements of its collective memory were still mired in bitterness and grief, Whitman invites the reader to feel an America in full-tilt renaissance mode.
The Spirit in the Material World
The vision of poets is the “most solid announcement of any” (Line 21). It is a curious, even provocative closing argument in a poem that has otherwise trumpeted the nation’s “science, ships, politics, cities, factories” (Line 14). In the poem’s stirring valediction, however, the speaker reminds a generation of new-age Americans (and our own generation of computer-savvy digital consumers) easily distracted by the near-constant wave of novel gadgets designed to make their lives simpler, their work easier, their leisure more abundant. The speaker upholds the importance of the creative mind, the energy that cannot be contained, measured, captured, or harnessed; the imagination and the tectonic visionary perceptions of those who can easily be forgotten, even discounted, as Americans discovered the practical magic of instant communication, electricity, rapid transportation systems, the massive factories of heavy industrialization, and a plethora of ease-inducing domestic appliances. Enjoy your electric light bulbs, but never forget the mind that first conceived of that possibility when the very idea seemed preposterous.
The poem challenges the popular conception that things, so concrete and so “now,” are self-testifying and unarguably real, while ideas and epiphanies, based on illogic, are by comparison ephemeral, flighty, and somehow both here and not here at the same time. Do not forget, in your embrace of gadgets, the poet cautions, that the energy that is never tapped out, never obsolete is the liberated spirit of invention itself, whether in the blueprints of architects, the patent schematics of inventors, the passionate rhetoric of social activists, or supremely (and here Whitman returns to his characteristic swagger) in poems themselves that seem so trivial and fragile but will surely outlast every gizmo his readers have embraced in their never-ending quest to make their lives easier. In this, these creative and defiant individuals assume their critical place as the spirits in the material world of Whitman’s Machine Age America.
The Role of the Poet
At the center of a poem that so boldly celebrates America’s resurgence after its bloody civil war with its heady embrace of technology is the figure of the poet who grasps the implications of this renaissance and acts as its moral conscience, reminding a too-complacent Gilded Age materialistic culture of the genuine gift of those creative souls (and Whitman would use the term literally) whose intellect and passion made all of this possible.
In a poem that celebrates stuff, those tangible realities, and that clearly focuses on pragmatic productivity—ships, factories, politics, sciences, cities—the central figure, really the only figure in the poem, is the poet. What does a poet do?
Here, the poet offers neither tidy moral insights nor enthralling stories. The poem’s manipulations of language, its rhythm and rhyme schemes, seem at best careless and at worst juvenile. What then is the poet’s work? Infused by the soaring arguments of Whitman’s generation of Transcendentalists, with their conception of a material world that sustains a profoundly spiritual reality, Whitman offers a third possible role for the poet: a spiritual seer, a national mystic, more like a religious figure or prophet than an artist, not just inspiring but radically realigning the axis of the listener’s perception of their nation. Poets see so that others may glimpse. We see slivers, poets see the whole.
And such visions, the speaker assures us in those audacious closing lines, are more durable, more “solid” (Line 21), than the gizmos and gadgets of the new scientific revolution. We are to trust in the sensibilities and spiritual reach of the poet/seer and in turn embrace the offer to celebrate nothing less than the country renewed.
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By Walt Whitman
