BOOKS
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Bly's troubl ed yearning to achi eve the condition o f a Whitman
most shows in passages of "The Night Journey in the Cooking Po t":
I see the road ahead ,
and my body cries out, and leaps into the air,
and throws itself on the fl oor, knocking over the chairs.
I think I am the body,
the body ru sh es in and ties me up,
and then goes through the ho u se....
I am ashamed looking at the fi sh in the water.
Suddenl y I am those who run large railroads at dusk,
who stand around the fall en beast howling,
who cannot get free,
the man the lion bounding ca tch es in the African grass .
I decide that death is fri endl y.
Finall y death seeps up through the tiniest capillaries
of my toes.
I fall into my own hands,
fences break down under horses,
cities starve, who le towns of singing women carrying
to the burial fields
the look I saw on my father 's face,
I sit down again , I hit my own body,
I sho ut at mysel[, I see wha t I h ave betrayed .
What I have written is not good enough .
Who does it help?
I am ashamed sitting on the edge of my bed.
Whitman' s influence is everywhere: in the image of the road , in that
tenth round mind-body tussle in the first stanza, in lines like " 1 am
ashamed looking a t... " and "Suddenl y 1 am those who .. .," and espe–
ciall y in the facil e announcement "1 decide that death is fri endl y." But
Whitman was not, so far as 1 can recall, ever ashamed sitting on the
edge of hi s bed, nor did h e ever announce a decision in hi s poetry tha t
"death is fri endly." For Whitman, death was a fact of his condition , not
a subj ect for deba te. Whitman' s belief became the condition of his
poetry, not the occasion for it.
No, " thi s is not the perfect freedom of the saints" for it lacks the
saint's bedrock of belief; the result is a poetry of claim instead o f
conviction :
