ROBERT K. MARTIN
87
to
his own identification with the black slaves. Both evoke guilt because of
their (implicit) double violation of taboo: homosexuality and miscegenation
are the twin crimes so feared in American thought. (And we recall that
Whitma?' s famous letter implied that he had broken the lesser of the two, lest
he be found guilty of the greater!)
Starting with section 7 there is a drastic change brought about by the
poet's acceptance of the world, an acceptance which is possible through his
perception of unity in space and time. The agitation of sexuality, the
immediate sensation of guilt following it, and the fantasy of death and loss
which accompany its completion give way to a sense of sexual calm and peace.
The poet learns to accept the daytime world of disunity (' 'the rich running
day' ') because it is part of the cycle which always leads back
to
the night and
love and the Great Mother. His love of experience and diversity does not lead
him to forget the world of unity and calm, but rather to accept both:
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her
in whom I lay so long:
I wzllstop only a time with the night, andnse betimes.
I wzll duly pass the day
0
my mother andduly return to you.
Much as I am indebted to the thoughtful book of Edwin Haviland Miller
(Walt Whitman 's Poetry : A PsychologicalJourney),
I must take issue with his
particular emphasis on such a passage as evidence of Whitman's regressive
patterns and what he implies
to
be an unresolved oedipal situation. I do not
feel any
personal
maternal qualities in his poem. The mother addressed here
seems
to
me
to
be a universal mother, goddess of the night, of the dream, of
the vision, of all that is excluded from the daylight world of jobs, reason, and
fathers. Reading the poem in terms of personal psychology seems to me
to
miss the essential significance ofWhitman 's vision, which achieves a return to
a state of primal consciousness, which is pre-patriarchal, and cyclical rather
than linear. His essentially matriarchal vision leads him to send the poet back
to the Night-Mother (forces of darkness, mystery, and the unknown)
to
be
reborn from her. The Mother is the death-sleep which follows upon the male
striving of sexuality, but it is also the repose that heals and out of which the
fallen penis may rise again:
Not you wzHyieldforth the dawn again more surely than
you wzHyieldforth me again,
Not the womb yields the babe in its time more surely than
I shall be yieldedfrom you in my time.
The sexual experience is revealed by this poem
to
be the gateway
to
the
