A walk through the cemetery with Walt

This post is my response to the Whitman assignment Christine posted on her blog, found here.

I think this a well-written and clear assignment. Christine treats the poem, the subject and her students with respect. Perhaps respect seems like an odd word choice but I think that it is very fitting. Christine has isolated a small but key part of “Song of Myself” that reflects on a visit to a cemetery. It might be tempting to bring up the scary or Goth images of a cemetery but like Whitman she treats this setting with respect. Whitman has found beauty and romance in “uncut hair of graves” and the assignment uses a similar approach to bring the student into an early part of the poem.

The first part of the assignment asks the students to write freely in their journals about their immediate response to the poem. This is a great way to get students started on an essay. When I did this part of the assignment I found that I was able to address several things that were on my mind after reading the fourteen or so assigned lines of the poem. I always struggle with how and where to begin an essay so having this step outlined for me in the writing process was very helpful. Having a chance to work this through in a journal entry will make starting an essay much easier.

JOURNAL ENTRY:

Reflections on a short passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855)

This is a tricky passage for me to focus on because to find it chosen for me out all the possibilities in this work, took my breath away. For as long as I can remember I have been intrigued by cemeteries … the living, the dead, the art, the silence, the pageantry, the emptiness, and on and on. So much can be found and experienced in a cemetery. I have many favorite cemeteries and like to visit them regularly. I also explore and photograph cemeteries when I’m in a new place. When I was a child I would beg my parents to drive through the cemetery on the way home from church. But enough about me, what about the poem?

I can see the child in the first line running around the cemetery, not really understanding where he is; for him it is just another place to play and explore. Hands full of grass from a grave he wonders “What is the grass?” Perhaps he has never seen grass and doesn’t know the word for it but to an adult who has a different understanding of this place the innocent question seems to be asking for so much more than a botany lesson. The images Whitman gives us are lovely (“handkerchief of the Lord”), beautiful (“a scented gift”), mysterious (“hieroglyphic”) and romantic. This is not the cemetery of horror films and hauntings. A cemetery, for Whitman, is not a sad or frightening place.

Whitman knows that a cemetery (or dead) is where we all end up; “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff”, all “the same”, all received the same. The grass grows around them, between them, and over them. The same grass grows “among black folks as among white”. Death can’t be cheated and death does not discriminate. Throughout his poem Whitman gathers groups of people together and he does it here in this cemetery. Whitman represents us all as one in the cities and in the end. I think it’s fascinating that he puts us together in death before he puts us together in life.

My three to five page essay for this assignment would focus on the topic in my last paragraph. I would like to take a closer look at the lists of people and occupations we find several times in Whitman’s poem.