I Memory:

Walt Whitman and the Evolving Role of Remembering

Conventional wisdom often insinuates that memory is a replay of previously experienced data. It is more appropriate to think of the act of remembering as a conscious performance in which the mind weaves fragments of truth with subjective reconstructions on the basis of current motivations. Rarely is memory an accurate portrait of objective reality. The significance of a particular memory is further complicated when consciously employed in artistic creation. Generalizations of meaning must be thrown away; the particular context defines the function.

Walt Whitman uses memory as a stylistic or formal structure in a number of poems, and their functions vary in each, particularly as the poet’s chosen themes, methodologies, and identities shift. “The Sleepers,” “Out of the Cradle,” and “The Artilleryman’s Vision” manipulate memory to compliment and develop the poems’ themes, as well as reflect the general atmosphere of the progressive phases of Whitman’s career. As Whitman’s goals metamorphosed through the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century, so do the constructions and effects of the editions of Leaves of Grass evolve. While memory tends to function as reminder of loss or death throughout his work, there are notable differences in its presentations and implications as Whitman’s career developed.

“The Sleepers” appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). Although unique unto itself as one of the first successful performances of a stream-of-consciousness technique, “The Sleepers” is quite representative of Whitman’s early motivations and proclamations: namely, to declare transcendentally the poet’s cosmic Self. Naturally, one’s notion of selfhood determines one’s concept of memory, as consciousness is itself an epic of discovery in which memory serves as a form of narrative structure. In “The Sleepers,” Whitman presents a wandering, fluid self, one which can confidently say “I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, / And I become the other dreamers” (30-31). This is not a personal identity, but a meta-self rising above multiplicity and personality into the demigod-like realm. Within the context of the poem, the reminiscence in the sixth section is less biographical than it may at first seem and more of a symbolic vignette.

The speaker recalls a story told by his/her mother in which “a red squaw” came to the old homestead one morning, stayed until mid-afternoon, and left, never to be seen or heard from again. The speaker says, “My mother looked with delight and amazement at the stranger” (106), and, “Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity” (109). At first, this second-degree vignette appears out of place amidst all the surrealistic wanderings going on earlier in the poem—a slice of autobiographical material juxtaposed with impersonal promulgations does not seem to fit. Yet, the speaker’s position is more complicated than that of a typical storyteller, and therefore the identities in relation to the speaker are complicated as well. The image of the speaker’s mother is itself a memory, slipping into the nocturnal realm of the mother as super-personal figure, congruent with the darkness enfolding the sleepers’ dream. So, the memory of a recollection acts as a dream, and the speaker assumes the identity of both “mother” and “red squaw” in the same fluid fashion as other identities are assumed and superimposed; “I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly,” the poet says earlier in the poem (46). “Double yourself and receive me in darkness “(48) continues the speaker, and the function of the sixth section’s reminiscence becomes clear: in order to cast aside limited identity, the speaker loses him/herself in paradoxes containable only in the unconscious. The act of doubling occurs throughout the poem as identities swap and meld (note “old homestead” repeated in lines 101 and 102 or “rushes” and “rush-bottoming” in line 103). The speaker, mother, and red squaw’s selves overlap in the thick of remembrance as the section’s pronouns play on the fringes of ambiguity. Ultimately, the section uses remembrance in order to comment on memory as a function of identity. All memory works on the foundations of loss—what was once but is no more—and so identity, which is founded on memory, brings with it emptiness—a space of lack—and a certain amount of pain. The vanishing of the squaw represents loss and separation, which the poem triumphantly repairs in the final two sections with illustrations of unity and return. “I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you” (184) the speaker finishes, in contrast to the red squaw, who never returned. The emphasis is not on the particulars of the individual memory, but on how memory works both to establish a self and remind the self of its own limitations so that it can step beyond them and return to the cosmic Self forever wandering, like the squaw, in the womb of maternal darkness.

Whereas “The Sleepers” uses memory for thematic, less exclusive purposes, Whitman’s later uses of anamnesis involve more biographical and historically situated tones. Reminiscence in “The Sleepers” is almost entirely structural, a display of the self disappearing; in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” what the speaker remembers is more intimate and less universal.

Whitman first published the poem later named “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” in late1859, during the same period in which he wrote the “Calamus” cluster of poems. There is a distinct shift in ambience about these verses in comparison to Whitman’s initial poetic efforts. The idealism of the 1855/56 editions of Leaves of Grass, which featured the symbolic self of “Song of Myself” or “The Sleepers,” gives way to a more personalized self, more erotic and sensual—the solitary eroticism expands into more common and vital object-desire. The self depicted in the 1860 Leaves of Grass is aware that its existence is contingent on others and grounded in a biographical context. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” therefore, presents the poet with a personal past and attachments to particular events.

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” comprises a reminiscence of the poet as a child. The speaker recollects “two feather’d guests from Alabama” (26), a mating pair of birds. This “I” is gendered—“a curious boy” (30)—unlike the unspecific self in “The Sleepers,” and gives an autobiographical account of witnessing first-hand the male bird singing, apparently out of longing, for his mate, who one day disappears without trace. Much like the red squaw in the earlier poem, she never returns, and, similar to “The Sleepers,” the memory serves to illustrate a loss that helps define identity. In the case of the “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” he listens to and identifies with the remaining bird (“my brother” [70]), whose song awakens “the destiny” (157) of the child: his vocation as poet. Whitman structures the memory as personal and the experience as direct. The description of the events are more tangible and sensuous—the child’s heart is “arous’d” (170) by the bird’s song of divestiture. Ultimately, the poet uses memory in a similar fashion, illustrating loss: “Death, death, death, death, death” (173) underscores the entirety of the recollections, a song of the sea, which the poet in the end claims “whisper’s me” (183). The key difference is the emphasis on experience (loss or death) informing identity rather than identity consuming loss. The losses, however, in “The Sleepers” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” are experienced through another figure (the mother in the former, a bird in the latter), and both end on optimistic notes celebrating the birth of a self. In later editions, memory would come with much more ambiguity.

The Civil War, which brought the experiences of death and loss directly home to Whitman, seems also to have diminished his idealism, replacing it with a harsher realism and a more subdued “I.” The “Drum-Taps” poems were born during this war, first appearing in print in 1865. They are a drastic departure from Whitman’s previous style, achieving an almost antithetical atmosphere to his earlier emphases on subjectivity and the self, presenting reality through less ornamental lens and giving the effect of clear objectivity. “The Artilleryman’s Vision” presents another instance of remembering loss and death and its effect on the self—but this time within the all too real and historical backdrop of the Civil War.

The vision begins with a speaker in bed, “my wife at my side” slumbering (1). This self is not asleep, becoming the other dreamers; he is distinct, separate, and tragically awake. His vision “presses upon” him (5), as though they were dreadful and unreal fantasies. “All the scenes at the batteries arise in detail before me again, / The crashing and smoking, the pride of the men in their pieces” (10-11). This is not a fantastical journey, such as memory of the red squaw in “The Sleepers” entailed, nor is it a fond recollection of the birth of the poetic self from an observed death, such as occurred in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”; this is a cruel post-war haunting of battle-born destruction and “suffocating smoke” (16). It is a chaotic nightmare. Whitman’s use of memory paints an historical portrait of a specific, tormented self. Although this self is somewhat generalized as a prototypical veteran of the Civil War, the sense of a real individual, speaking in a straightforward manner, affords the poem a different, and perhaps more powerful, authenticity. This self, like those in “The Sleepers” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” emerges with a distinct identity on the basis of its experience of loss and death, although it is contingent on a specific historical context. Whitman still manages to universalize the self, as the final summation of the vision involves “bombs bursting in air” (25), suggesting the devastation of conflict provides for the birth of the nation (and its anthem). Instead of a cosmic or poetic self, “The Artilleryman’s Vision” presents a national self, and it is a far less optimistic conception. While Whitman’s earlier work showcases an “I” without limits, by his 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, ambiguity has taken firmer hold.

Throughout his writing, Whitman asserts the crucial role of memory in constructing an individual consciousness. As his perspectives evolved—and memories grew—the creative function of the individual self changed, from a cosmic, self-reliant identity in his earliest songs to a more personal and historically contingent self in later poems. Memory informs consciousness, and the self derives its own, present meaning from the fractured and fracturing episodes of the absent past. The narrative fragments that constitute consciousness manifest and take shape according to the motives of the present self, and so memory illustrates the momentary nature of an ever-becoming self. As changes in the self occur, recollections alter in both form and content.

Whitman plays with remembering as a performance and poetic structure in his various, evolving comments on identity. As his “I” evolved with time, time and memory enact evolving roles that compliment the changing urges behind Leaves of Grass. He always holds true, however, to the notion that recollection of the absent provides for a better understanding of one’s present world and identity

—S. Parker
29 November 2001

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