The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Afterword
Another constitutional crisis has passed, and Effigy Mounds National Monument, in northeastern Iowa, has reopened. A guide recites a history of the Native Americans who lived along the Upper Mississippi River: how they hunted and fished, gathered berries and nuts, fashioned tools, sang and danced. In the woods and on the bluff are hundreds of mounds, some in the shapes of birds and bears, others rising from the ground in domes, long straight lines, or a combination of the two—a visible record of 10,000 or more years of human habitation of this land. Indians built these mounds to bury their dead, appease the spirits, and maintain harmony with the eaarth, river, and sky. Inexplicably, they stopped mound-building sometime in the fourteenth century. Perhaps new tribes moved into the area, with different ideas about how to celebrate the lives of those who had passed on, ward off catastrophe, and keep the peace. No one can say for sure.
I am walking this sacred ground with poets and writers from around the world, discussing the spirit of the place, the history of human migration, the civil war in Syria, the short stories of Alice Munro, a first novel accepted for publication, the clouds building to the west, a barge on the river: call it the literary “blab of the pave.” I have in mind a map tracing the routes by which men and women left their homes in Africa to settle Europe and Asia, Australia and the Americas, bearing their stories, songs, and rituals to the distant reaches of the earth, binding us together in a web of connections, artistic, cultural, and social, not to mention the very physical makeup of our bodies. These intrepid spirits are part of who I am, carried in my genes; the pleas and petitions that I make to God and the beloved; the trees, river, and sky that inform my walk in the sun. My foot lodges in a hole covered by leaves, near a burial mound, and it occurs to me that I may have twisted my knee here long ago. Maybe the consequences were dire then. Did my comrades leave me behind for the start of the hunt? Did they bury me with a bird-boned awl?
These reflections, these improvisations on the origins of American poetry, have but one design: to draw you closer to me, not in “the bitter hug of mortality,” but mindful of Whitman’s belief that death unites us, just as we are united on this page, however briefly. This journey does not end. I too will “stop somewhere waiting for you.”
Question
In almost all copies of the first edition of “Song of Myself” (1855), the period at the very end of the poem is missing; only the first few copies off the press had the period, and then the loose piece of type fell off. For a century and a half, readers believed that this absence of a period was an intentional omission by Whitman. If we read the poem with no period at the end, how does that change the way we respond to Whitman’s final words?