Old Ireland (Walt Whitman)

[struggle4progress]

FAR hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother,
Once a queen, now lean and tatter'd seated on the ground,
Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders,
At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,
Long silent, she too long silent, mourning her shrouded hope and heir,
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love.

Yet a word ancient mother,
You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with fore-
head between your knees,
O you need not sit there veil'd in your old white hair so dishevel'd,
For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave,
It was an illusion, the son you love was not really dead,
The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another country,
Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave,
What you wept for was translated, pass'd from the grave,
The winds favor'd and the sea sail'd it,
And now with rosy and new blood,
Moves to-day in a new country.

[pnwmom]

1. Hard to reconcile that Walt Whitman with this one:

The bulwark of truth—the "unterrified democracy,"5 ruled by a tattered, coarse, unshaven, filthy, Irish rabble! Americans, high in reputation, degrading themselves worse than the slavish nobles who of old kissed the toe of the triple crowned! They knelt to the Pope himself; Americans, to the abjectest menials of the Pope.6

https://whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/journalism/tei/per.00398.html

[JI7]

2. do you have trouble with Charles Dickens also ?

[pnwmom]

3. If he said things like this, then yes:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Northwestern-U-Graduate/140531

Walt Whitman, the acclaimed "poet of democracy," made several racist statements toward the end of his life. He called black people "baboons" and "wild brutes," said America is "for the whites,"

[JI7]

5. so lincoln also ? how about the entire catholic church even today and their views on lgbt ?

[pnwmom]

6. Whataboutism isn't the best argument.

The Catholic Church has done many wrong things.

That doesn't have anything to do with my being surprised about Walt Whitman. I thought he just wrote longwinded, self-important poems. There was a whole side to him I didn't know about.

[JI7]

7. but actions matter even more and the Catholic Church has carried out far worse

[struggle4progress]

9. The Eighteenth Presidency!

... Are lawyers, dough-faces, and the three hundred and fifty thousand owners of slaves, to sponge the mastership of thirty millions? ... Never were These States so insulted, and attempted to be betrayed! All the main purposes for which the government was established are openly denied. The perfect equality of slavery with freedom is flauntingly preached in the North -- nay, the superiority of slavery. The slave trade is proposed to be renewed. Everywhere frowns and misunderstandings -- everywhere exasperations and humiliations ... In fifteen of The States the three hundred and fifty thousand masters keep down the true people, the millions of white citizens, mechanics, farmers, boatmen, manufacturers, and the like, excluding them from politics and from office, and punishing by the lash, by tar and feathers, binding fast to rafts on the rivers or trees in the woods, and sometimes by death, all attempts to discuss the evils of slavery in its relations to the whites. The people of the territories are denied the power to form State governments unless they consent to fasten upon them the slave-hopple, the iron wristlet, and the neck-spike ...The young genius of America is not going to be emasculated and strangled just as it arrives toward manly age. It shall live, and yet baffle the politicians and the three hundred and fifty thousand masters of slaves ... Man can not hold property in man. As soon as there are clear-brained original American judges, this saying will be simplified by their judgments ... How much longer do you intend to submit to the espionage and terrorism of the three hundred and fifty thousand owners of slaves? ... You young men of the Southern States! is the word Abolitionist so hateful to you, then? Do you not know that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and all the great Presidents and primal warriors and sages were declared abolitionists? You young men! American mechanics, farmers, boatmen, manufacturers, and all work-people of the South, the same as the North! you are either to abolish slavery, or it will abolish you ... Freedom against slavery is not issuing here alone, but is issuing everywhere. The horizon rises, it divides I perceive, for a more august drama than any of the past. Old men have played their parts, the act suitable to them is closed, and if they will not withdraw voluntarily, must be bid to do so with unmistakeable voice. Landmarks of masters, slaves, kings, aristocracies, are moth-eaten, and the peoples of the earth are planting new vast landmarks for themselves. Frontiers and boundaries are less and less able to divide men. The modern inventions, the wholesale engines of war, the world-spreading instruments of peace, the steamship, the locomotive, the electric telegraph, the common newspaper, the cheap book, the ocean mail, are interlinking the inhabitants of the earth together as groups of one family -- America standing, and for ages to stand, as the host and champion of the same, the most welcome spectacle ever presented among nations. Every thing indicates unparalleled reforms. Races are marching and countermarching by swift millions and tens of millions. Never was justice so mighty amid injustice; never did the idea of equality erect itself so haughty and uncompromising amid inequality, as to-day. Never were such sharp questions asked as to-day ... On all sides tyrants tremble, crowns are unsteady, the human race restive, on the watch for some better era, some divine war. No man knows what will happen next, but all know that some such things are to happen as mark the greatest moral convulsions of the earth ...

https://whitmanarchive.org/archive1/works/supplementaryprose/frameset.html

[pnwmom]

10. Did he not know how to write in paragraphs? n/t

[struggle4progress]

13. He was a talented and inventive poet. I suspect he may have been easily overcome

by his own sentimentalism and that the persona of the poet is an idealized vision of his own ego. Nobody considers him a great political thinker or social theorist. But he had a stunning and sparkling vision. We should try to put it into practice

[struggle4progress]

12. ... Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that

pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the
women my sisters and lovers ...

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any
more than he ...

... I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same ...

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly
smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick
blankets hanging from their shoulders,
On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his
luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his
bride by the hand,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight
locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to
her feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and
weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd
feet,
And gave him a room that enter'd from my own, and gave him
some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd
north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner ...

The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags
underneath on its tied-over chain,
The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and
tall he stands pois'd on one leg on the string-piece,
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over
his hip-band,
His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his
hat away from his forehead,
The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black
of his polish'd and perfect limbs ...

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that
is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the
largest the same ...

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe ...

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appoint-
ments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest ...

Whoever degrades another degrades me ...

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of
the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon ...

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars ...

https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27







https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27

[ucrdem]

4. Yeah there's that.

Still it's a nice poem. Not exactly flattering or politically aware but at least sympathetic ...

[struggle4progress]

8. Perhaps Whitman was a complicated person. He seems to have had a long romantic relationship

with Peter Doyle, who came to America at age eight after being born in Ireland in 1843(?) --- despite the fact that Whitman was an abolitionist and Doyle a confederate veteran

[ucrdem]

11. That's very plausible.

He also seems aware of the Celtic Revival which was going strong around the turn of the century. "Riders to the Sea" is a famous play with an old woman much like the one in the poem though it was first performed in 1904 and Whitman seems to have been writing in the 1890s. Otherwise I'd guess he came home and wrote it after seeing it performed in NYC. Here's a speech where the central character Maurya, having already lost a husband and four sons to the sea, learns that her fifth and sixth sons have also drowned:

Maurya: (raising her head and speaking as if she did not see the people around her) They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.... I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_to_the_Sea

And then they keen . . .

[OnDoutside]

14. This is the Old Ireland I like !