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[Impromptu on Buffalo Citys monument to, and re-burial of the old Iroquois orator, October 9, 1884.]
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Upon this scene, this show,
Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
(Nor in caprice alone some grains of deepest meaning,)
Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds blended
shapes,
As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrilld with its soul,
Product of Natures sun, stars, earth direct a towering human
form,
In hunting-shirt of film, armd with the rifle, a half-ironical smile
curving its phantom lips,
Like one of Ossians ghosts looks down.
Trees, rocks and cliffs are solid things that Whitman is relating life to-meaning something has awakened it for example “Thrilled with it’s soul
By “Product if natures and them mentioning the sun, stars and earth I feel like this poem is talking about evolution what can come from nothingness which clue me because of “Direct a towering human form”
Meaning the new human brought out into the world not thinking but born to fight
Ironic in the sense that the human is born to fight but only half because it could go the other way
Phantom means ghostly or spirited almost like this human has arisen from the dead through nature-described by his lips
Ossian is the narrator, and supposed author, of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, a character from Irish mythology. The furor over the authenticity of the poems continued into the 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossian
My Interpretation:
I feel like this poem is about an illusion of Whitman’s. Visualizing seeing someone rise from the dead. Whitman did a lot of free verse writing about death, sexuality and deism (meaning more than one faith) or a different faith. Almost like the person that he is seeing from the dead was a slave. He wrote a lot about that as well. Meaning something that was so beautiful by nature was brought up to fight meaning fight for their lives to live. If you look up “Red Jacket” it is actually the name of a man who was the leader of a wolf gang he was also a chief who claimed to kill Americans.
Or my second thought would be that this poem is describing the jacket as an entrance to either heaven or hell