Church is the one place where you can talk and think about things that are downbeat like death and why bad things happen. At least, in my church.
Well, two responses:
1) I didn't mean to say Whitman never took on challenging or dark topics and only wrote about rainbows and unicorns. For example, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," written in 1865, was about mourning Lincoln's death. Here's a good Wikpedia description:
"The poem, written in free verse in 206 lines, uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Despite the poem being an elegy to the fallen president, Whitman neither mentions Lincoln by name nor discusses the circumstances of his death. Instead, Whitman uses a series of rural and natural imagery including the symbols of the lilacs, a drooping star in the western sky (Venus), and the hermit thrush, and employs the traditional progression of the pastoral elegy in moving from grief toward an acceptance and knowledge of death. The poem also addresses the pity of war through imagery vaguely referencing the American Civil War (1861–1865) which ended only days before the assassination.
And here are the first few lines:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love. Again, I'm not familiar enough with Whitman or even other poets to make sweeping generalizations, but I was comparing him less to traditional church services than I was to poets who might be less appropriate than Whitman for church quotation. For example, here's a passage from Sylvia Path's "Daddy":
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.Probably not ideal sermon content.
2) It's possible that Whitman, like traditional church services, share an inclination to explore dark or downbeat subjects but emerge with relatively encouraging, comforting, upbeat answers. Not upbeat in the false happy-face sense, more like upbeat as opposed to a total downer.
I mean, I don't know how your church goes about it, but I've never heard a pastor saying, "If you were wondering about death, here's the stark reality: it's simply the end of existence -- your consciousness ceases to experience any awareness after you die and that's the end of you." Or, "If you're wondering why bad things happen, the answer is that it's completely random because there's no fairness or order to life in the universe and there's no controlling figure who cares what happens to any particular individual or group."
Many churches have traditionally provided semi-comforting answers to troubling questions: When you die you go to Heaven. Bad things happen because the Lord works in mysterious ways but He has His reasons."
I don't know Whitman well enough to say whether he does or doesn't ever do that. But I think in his free-verse abstract way, he takes those big subjects to a different level that people might find wise or comforting, as they do a typical Christian sermon.
P.S. After posting that, I thought about how Robert Frost might fit in. In my again limited knowledge, he does take on big subjects. But in his case, it's often through subtle metaphors like what the woods that are lovely, dark and deep symbolize. Do people sitting in the pews -- trying to get their kids to sit still or thinking about the solo performance they're doing in a few minutes -- take the time to figure out the metaphors?
I've often read that Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is the most widely misunderstood poem in history. And that's by people who are giving it their full attention!
Topic: Cellar Scribblings (Read 13157633 times)