Drench with Your Splendor Me

Perhaps because this semester seemed to go by so quickly, the span in American Literature I between the  worldview of Cotton Mather and that of Walt Whitman stood out strongly and rang with possibility. We traveled from a narrow little world where evil reigned, empowered by leaders and followers who could see no other option but that we cavort with the devil and become devils ourselves. The "invisible world" wherein evil gets the upper hand becomes the only world we know, and guilt by association, guilt by coincidence, guilt by the jealousy and greed of one's accusers, and guilt by accusations of children and childish-minded adults becomes the law of the land.

The irony, of course, is that, if we believe we are possessed of evil, we are possessed of evil, and will act accordingly. How did we survive that narrow little world? Salem was not Washington, D.C., but perhaps there are lessons we could go back and study and relearn about how not to allow magical thinking undermine our capacity for rational thought.

And though there were many weeks remaining after reading Mather, it seemed as if suddenly we felt the wind and sun and salt air on our faces as we ferried from Brooklyn to Manhattan alongside Whitman. "Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!" Whitman exclaims. In our final class, as we read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," we wondered at that hyperbaton—a use of unusual word order—"drench with your splendor me." It's one of my favorite lines of American poetry, and I consider "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" the great American poem. We wondered at Whitman's capacity to contain all—to acknowledge the dark side(s) of human nature while still celebrating human nature and life and all the possibilities therein. 

Whitman's is a voice we need in these dark times, as stupid people turn loose the demons of greed and self-righteousness and hypocrisy and all the other nasty little inhabitants of their invisible worlds upon the rest of us. Each of us, Whitman reminds us, contains all. It is our blessing and responsibility to choose what part of that "all" we will allow out into the visible, communal world.