I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured. I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me, For after we start we never lie by again. This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself. Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence. Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
Afterword
Whitman’s offer in this section to “wash the gum” from our eyes, to habituate us “to the dazzle of the light” shining through every moment of existence, comes with a catch: we must be bold enough to venture into the unknown, to meet the world stripped of our preconceptions and illusions, to measure the vast within and without; if we have the courage to take to the open road, alert to possibilities heretofore unimagined, mindful of the routines that blind us to what is there, our walk in the sun may lead to a deeper knowledge of the cosmos. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite,” William Blake wrote in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” a signal event in the evolution of modern poetry. “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Whitman proposes that we take this lesson to heart, applying to the whole of life the essence of creativity—which is to leave the cavern and see what has been right in front of us all along.
In the hills around the village where I grew up were abandoned mica mines, which once supplied Muscovy glass for windows and horse-drawn carriages; the entrances were boarded up, but outside in the slag were sheets of the mineral, which peeled apart in yellowish leaves. These I would hold over my eyes, casting the earth, trees, and sky in a sepia light, which intrigued me. The world would take on the tint of the photographs in our books about the Civil War, blurring for a moment the distinction between my experience and that of the soldiers whose sacrifice laid the groundwork for a new conception of America, in line with what Whitman invoked in “Song of Myself.” Years passed before this exercise in the woods raised questions in my mind about the nature of truth (what is real? what imagined?), which I could not answer; this unknowingness I came eventually to associate with the promise of the open road.
In his preface to a collection of miscellaneous writings, John Updike suggested that his critical work bore the same relation to his fiction as that of a sailor hugging the shore, unwilling to take his boat into open water. Just so, Whitman wants us “To jump off in the midst of the sea, to rise again,” to join him in the celebration of the endlessly unfolding drama of the cosmos, on every stage of which there is the possibility of vision and transformation.
Question
In this section, the poet tells us he can hear us asking him questions, but he also tells us his only answer is that he “cannot answer,” that “you must find out for yourself.” Whitman senses that, at this point in the poem, readers will have many questions about the things the poet has claimed. What are your questions to the poet at this point? And how can you go about finding the answers for yourself?