90
PARTISAN REVIEW
The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze andlook a long time, andstlently brush away flies
with my hand.
The youngsterand the red-facedgirl turn aside up the bushy htll,
Ipeen'ngly view them from the top .
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor ofthe bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbledhair, I note where the pistol
hasfallen .
From childhood to adolescence to death; from birth to reproduction to
death ; from the "little one ... in its cradle" to the "bushy hill"
to
"the
bloody floor ... the pistol has fallen." The sight of nakedness leads in visual
terms to a realization of death and suggests the ambivalent attitude toward
the male genitals. But it is crucial
to
see that if one' 'cannot be shaken away "
then one must accept all. He must accept the penis beneath the foreskin, the
erect penis, :::.nd the penis after coitus. The acceptance of these three stages can
lead
to
an
ac~eptance
of the same three stages of life and thereby to an
acceptance of life as a whole in all its multiplicity, and so the second half of
this leads to the fust catalogue, and we begin to understand the meaning in
Whitman's work of the catalogue-the expression of ultimate unity of things
seen not on their surface but seen
sub specie aeternitatae,
a point of view that
for Whitman was best arrived at through a sexual experience.
The following sections of the poem go out, literally, into the world and
lead , for instance, to the celebrated section
11,
where the abstract vision of
section 8 is transformed into a very specific vision of masturbation.
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men andallso fnendly;
Twenty-eight years ofwomanly /tIe andallso lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the nse ofthe bank
She hides handsome andn'chly drest aft the blinds ofthe window.
Which ofthe young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest ofthem is beauttlul to her.
Where are you offto, lady ?forI see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock stdlin yourroom
Dancing andlaughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth
bather,
The rest didnot see her, but she saw them andlovedthem.
