New York & Whitman
By Eli Siegel
Now I get back to Walt Whitman, who is, although born in Huntington, Long Island, a New York boy. Is he New York! Earlier, I read a passage from his Specimen Days about Manhattan seen from the bay. This passage is in the section called “Human and Heroic New York”:
The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn—(will not the time hasten when the two shall be municipally united...?)—what I may call the human interior and exterior of these great seething oceanic populations...is to me best of all.
People knew that a bridge was going to be built between New York and Brooklyn. If you lived when it was being constructed, you could watch the people at work, which is a chance we don’t have now. We either ride or walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, or we don’t ride or walk over it. Whitman goes on:
After an absence of many years, (I went away at the outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay since,) again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets I knew so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic Bowery—human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day—in the places of amusement at night—bubbling and whirling and moving like its own environment of waters—endless humanity in all phases—Brooklyn also—taken in for the last three weeks.
That is one sentence, and the parsing of it would be a little difficult. Then:
The brief total of the impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me comforting, even heroic.
That statement, that New York is “comforting,” is something to see. Later in this section Whitman says:
In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours...I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people,...the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken...—city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings.
Whitman Tells of a New York Stage-Driver
There are other things about New York in Whitman’s prose, but I’m going to read two instances of his poetry on the subject. The first is part of a poem not so often considered these days. It’s one of the saddest poems of Whitman. He worked hard on it, and revised it. I’m sure he was never wholly pleased with it. But it has a section about the funeral of a stage-driver. The stagecoaches and the drivers are part of Whitman’s life. He just liked going on those horse-driven vehicles, the stagecoaches, omnibuses, horse-cars. He admired the drivers, as De Quincey and Dickens admired them in England. This is from Whitman’s “To Think of Time”:
A gray discouraged sky overhead, the short last daylight of December,
A hearse and stages, the funeral of an old Broadway stage-driver, the cortege mostly drivers.
Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell,
The gate is pass’d, the new-dug grave is halted at, the living alight, the hearse uncloses,
The coffin is pass’d out, lower’d and settled, the whip is laid on the coffin, the earth is swiftly shovel’d in.
He was a good fellow, free-mouth’d, quick-temper’d, not bad-looking,
Ready with life or death for a friend, fond of women, gambled, ate hearty, drank hearty,
Had known what it was to be flush, grew low-spirited toward the last, sicken’d, was help’d by a contribution,
Died, aged forty-one years—and that was his funeral.
Good day’s work, bad day’s work, pet stock, mean stock, first out, last out, turning-in at night,
To think that these are so much and so nigh to other drivers, and he there takes no interest in them.
We have, at least, the feeling of the New York stages.
Manhattan Has These
A poem which is not Whitman at his best—hardly—is “Mannahatta” (he has two poems called that). But it’s worth looking at because of the things one can see that are told of in it. He wrote it first in 1860 and revised it; we have it in its form of 1881:
I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,
I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
Because I see that word nested in nests of waterbays, superb,
Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded....
Well, there is difficulty in this poem. When Whitman is good he can be as speedy as anything and we have the stability of the world present anyway. But here stability fights mobility. There are times in the poem when the two meet and make for the best lines.
There is difficulty in the first lines: “I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, / Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.” I don’t think that is wholly accurate. I think that Whitman was taken by the speed and substantiality of the name Mannahatta, which sounds almost as if it were from the Sanskrit—almost as good as Bhagavad-Gita or Ramayana and Mahabharata.
“Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient”: occasionally Whitman didn’t know what to say, and so he let one adjective follow another. “Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb”: that is not one of the good lines of Whitman.
The next line, though, has a good construction of motion and vertical stability: “Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded.” The vertical and horizontal motions meet here. It’s not the greatest line of Whitman, but it’s better than the previous lines. You feel that the line is like an iron column in one of those cotton factor houses on downtown Broadway, the 300 block—and still there’s motion.
“The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas.” That has motion, but doesn’t have the motion of, say, “Come Up from the Fields Father,” or even “There Was a Child Went Forth,” let alone “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” And then, the great motion in the last part of “Song of Myself” it doesn’t have.
“The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers, well-model’d.” That’s pretty musical but you get the feeling this is a mingling of painting and sculpture, not poetic enough.
Motion, Difficulty, & Kindness
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses of business of the shipmerchants and money-brokers, the river-streets,
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.
A line that definitely has stoppage and motion is “Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week.” Then Whitman gets to a different effect in a line that has more space in it than any other: “The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft.” That is about Manhattan too, because even on Wall Street if you look sharp you can see the clouds above the skyscrapers. There is a certain effect of seeing clouds from narrow streets, and Liberty Street and Cedar Street are damnably narrow (as Mr. Mantolini in Nicholas Nickleby would say).
“The mechanics of the city,...looking you straight in the eyes.” Whitman had a tendency to find a spirit in people. He’d find Christ in a mechanic, and what he felt about it he tried to say.
Then, “Trottoirs throng’d”: we know Whitman liked to use French terms when he could. Trottoirs are about the same as pavements. The word should be used in an advertisement for Best & Co., not here:
Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!
There is obviously motion and horizontality and the vertical in “City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!” The freest line, or part of a line, is “my city!” with its use of the personal and largeness.
I read “Mannahatta” because there is difficulty in it. There is difficulty in New York. So I close with this poem, which I cannot praise as much as I’d like to. I think it’s not one of the felicitous poems of Whitman. But that is as it should be, because we all know that New York is going through difficulties. Therefore it was well to end with this poem in a talk called New York Begins Poetically. 
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