24 pages • 48 minutes read
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
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Symbols & Motifs
Interwar
It seems odd to suggest that this poem is tragic, that it is sobering and cautious, restrained and uncertain—seldom adjectives applied to any Whitman poem. The poet here celebrates the recovery of his nation from the devastation and brutalities of the self-inflicted horrors of the Civil War, at the time of the writing still vivid within the national consciousness. Everywhere he turns his wide-eyed lens he chronicles the evidence of that recovery, the emergence of new inventions, the energy of ever-expanding cities, the factories that never quiet, and the hum and buzz of perpetual commerce.
Yet the Civil War has taken its toll on the poet, a grim and disquieting reality that he inserts between parentheses early on in the poem. It is his darkest moment, his acknowledgement that what the war taught him was the inevitability of war itself. As such, within parentheticals, this dark suggestion works as a kind of minor-key contrapuntal movement against the poem’s otherwise heroic optimism. Whitman, born in the ecstatic ebullience of the first-generation of Americans not born British subjects, lived to see that bold and vigorous experiment fall not to some invading empire but to itself, to its own greed and anger.
Whitman’s verse after the war reflects that he has learned the precarious nature of the kind of peace that ensures the evolution of his beloved country. We have survived that war, he says in the parenthetical that begins in Line 2, “against all odds,” but perhaps in some time too fast approaching we will be tested by even “more dreadful contests” (Line 5). This is not the Whitman brand, trumpeting the resilience of his nation and its forever pitch forward into even grander moments. This parenthetical reflects how badly Whitman is shaken: that war is over, but there will be others and much sooner than we want. That parenthetical makes “As I Walk” neither a war poem nor a peace poem, but an interwar poem reflecting the hard reality that Whitman himself learned as he worked as a nurse in the grim wards of the Union hospital facility in Washington. War in the end is inevitable: The only experience worse than the war survived is the war that comes next.
Ships
The very first manifestations of his nation’s recovery into economic animation that the poet enumerates are “the ships” (Line 10). Laden with products of a booming economy, the ships ply trading lanes that reflect the newfound international economic viability of a nation just five years from having been blasted into apocalyptic economic ruin. Thus, along with the “vast” (Line 11) factories with their shifts of sweaty workers and the cities abuzz with mercantile energy, the ships represent the new can-do America, the “Phoenix” America rising from the ashes.
But much as the poet uses a parenthesis to interrogate his own optimism in the opening stanza, he uses a parenthetical with the ships to point out the obvious: Nothing lasts. Those ships plying the trading lanes and making America great again, they are doomed to obsolescence. “They will only last a few years,” he points out. In this aside, the poet reveals the deep-seated anxiety he harbors over his culture’s elevation of scientists and inventors, bankers and builders to the loftiest position of respect and authority. Nothing that this cabal of pragmatic, practical American-doers produces, nothing they patent, nothing they dazzle America with, nothing will last more than a few years. Even the mighty ship will depreciate into stacks of reusable timber and buckets of used bent nails. In this, Whitman reflects his own age (he was 60+), which at this point was more than a 10-year struggle against a host of physical ailments. Nothing, those ships tell him, not even himself, lasts.
The Poem
In the closing stanza, the poem elevates itself as the most promising (really the only promising) reality against the more obvious and pressing manifestations of time like trees and office buildings and, supremely for an increasingly frustrated poet, “science, ships, politics, cities, factories” (Line 14). For all their “thereness,” they cannot, indeed do not tap into the spiritual energy that, Whitman believed, compels each individual into eternity.
The more we build, what we build reminds us of our own finitude. The closing stanza, however, becomes a radiant counterargument. Consider, the poet says, not the ship as it plies the river on its way toward some fast-approaching future moment when it will be unceremoniously decommissioned and then scrapped. Against such inevitable obsolescence in the closing stanza the poet offers a most magnificent counterargument. Imagine, he says, the poem being read. Conceived within the soupy synapses of the brain and executed into sharable verses, the poem, a bare 21 lines, nowhere near the size and heft of ships, this poem, Whitman tacitly argues, will last as long as there is paper, as long as there are readers. The products of the intellect—the imagination, the diligence of person, the aspirations, the conscience—define Whitman’s grand offer of the poem itself as a something-different, a something real-er, a something that is “the most solid announcements of any” (Line 21). In this, Whitman uses the symbol of the poem itself, a fragile construct created within the inscrutable power of the imagination, as a symbol for those great achievements that cannot be measured, weighed, bartered, and/or lost—ideals, aspirations, aesthetic forms, intellectual and emotional freedom—that are timeless.
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By Walt Whitman
