1
With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
2
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
3
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
4
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
5
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
6
Thy ample, smiling face, dashd with the sparkling dimples of the
sun,
7
Thy brooding scowl and murk thy unloosd hurricanes,
8
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
9
Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears a lack from all
eternity in thy content,
10
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make
11
thee greatest no less could make thee,)
12
Thy lonely state something thou ever seekst and seekst, yet
never gainst,
13
Surely some right withheld some voice, in huge monotonous
14
rage, of freedom-lover pent,
15
Some vast heart, like a planets, chaind and chafing in those
breakers,
16
By lengthend swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
18
And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
19
And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
20
And undertones of distant lion roar,
21
(Sounding, appealing to the skys deaf ear but now, rapport for
once,
22
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
23
The first and last confession of the globe,
24
Outsurging, muttering from thy souls abysms,
25
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
26
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.
The sea Whitman is addressing is the Jersey Shore at Ocean Grove. He wrote the poem in 1883 while vacationing with naturalist John Burroughs. It was published in Harper’s in March 1884.
The first line is a catch-all for poetic sound devices. We have an interjection, a compound adjective, consonance, assonance, repeating trochees, personification and exclamation. The quick utterance of “husky-haughty” makes a hissing sound that suggests sea water fizzling as it hits the beach.
The waltzing dactyls in line 11 stand out from the prevailing rhythm: “something thou ever seek’st and seek’st yet never gain’st”. Interestingly, the double dactyls are broken up by rhyming trochees of opposite meaning: “ever” and “never”. The poem’s lilting dance is short-lived. This strengthens the theme of constraint and freedom denied.
In lines 1-4, Whitman addresses the sea. The development follows as the sea responds with its “varied strange suggestions” in lines 5-16. What follows is not as “plainly” listed as Whitman states.
Personification, present in almost every line, humanizes the sea. The sea has lips and dimples, it races, it smiles, it cries, it scowls, it feels lonely, it has a heart, it pants, hisses, mutters, laughs, and confesses. The sky is deaf. To modern-day readers, so much personification might border on the absurd, but the personification is a testament to Whitman’s imagination and gives the poem a clear nineteenth-century tone.
Parallelism is for used to heighten the torment and make the poem musical. The most effective use of parallelism is found in the lines beginning with the unstressed pronoun “thy”. The stilted pronoun is always unstressed and followed by a stressed syllable, forming iambs that suggest sharp, leaping waves.
The repetition of “thy” in the parallel structures keep the poem grounded as the torment mounts, a poetic version of pedal point in music (basically, a sustained bass note while increasing dissonances are introduced in the harmony). The effect is dramatic escalation that builds until the final line.
This line brings the poem full circle back to Whitman. Whitman is more than an observer—he’s related to the sea. The use of the word “kindred” is important here because it ties Whitman’s soul to the soul of the sea. With this revelation, the heavy personification is transformed into a kind of self-analysis. In looking at the sea, Whitman seems his own reflection.
Looking outside the text and into Whitman’s biography brings in some interesting angles to ponder. Lines 11-13 echo the longing sentiment expressed in a letter written to a friend in March of 1884, the same month and year that the poem made its public debut in Harper’s. “Why is it that a sense comes always crushing in on me, as of one happiness I have missed—life, and one friend & companion I have never made.” (Reynolds, 544)
Were Whitman’s repressed homosexual longings the reason for his suffering?
The idea of the sea having dimples seems a bit asburd. This points to Whitman being integrated with the sea, as he wrote in Song of Myself: “You, Sea! I am integral with you.” The heavy personification is transformed into a kind of self-analysis. In looking at the sea, Whitman sees his own reflection, his dimples, his scowl, his tears, and “white mane”. A reading of the poem in which Whitman and the sea are the same, provides an entry point for psychoanalytic methods of analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OGFeb2006_005.jpg
sexual imagery
some scholars believe “the first and last confession of the globe” is a reference to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Whitman had been discussing Darwin with Burroughs during this trip.
Whitman never reveals what the sea confesses. What is the “tale cosmic elemental passion?” Is it a confession of forbidden love? Appreciation of the poem doesn’t depend on knowing what erupted from the soul’s abysms—it’s between Whitman and the sea. This mystery is part of the poem’s beauty and enduring quality.
Free verse gives rhythm to the sea. The asymmetry of syllables and stresses represent both the ebb and flow of “white-maned racers racing to the goal” along with the waves of Whitman’s own consciousness. The poem is bookended by its shortest and most revealing lines. Between these lines, the poem rocks back and forth in waves of varying power, reaching a climax just before its conclusion, where it retreats to a level even lower than where it started, signifying a calm in the storm
Parallelism is for used to heighten the torment and make the poem musical. The most effective use of parallelism is found in the lines beginning with the unstressed pronoun “thy”. The stilted pronoun is always unstressed and followed by a stressed syllable, forming iambs that suggest sharp, leaping waves.
The repetition of “thy” in the parallel structures keep the poem grounded as the torment mounts, a poetic version of pedal point in music (basically, a sustained bass note while increasing dissonances are introduced in the harmony). The effect is dramatic escalation that builds until the final line.
mysterious line. Is this Whitman or the sky?
my reading: Whitman as an old man is looking wistfully back at his life and wondering why he never found true love. It would be consistent with Whitman’s egoism to think he was “above the rest.”
beauty in suffering