by Karen T. Sanders

Created on: March 17, 2009   Last Updated: March 18, 2009

Walt Whitman - An Affair with Life

"Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin - I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. -Walt Whitman, 'Reconciliation'

Walt Whitman had a love of life that reaches our hearts today. His passion and insightfulness into life and love helps us understands our lives and ourselves better. Even in his darkest and most depressing poems, there is a sense of life and love in them. In his poem, 'Reconciliation' (seen above), he expresses grief at the loss of even his enemy's life. Life is precious to Walt Whitman, even the life of the enemy.

No poem shows this love of life better than 'Live Oak, with Moss'. In the first stanza alone, Whitman greets life with a fiery passion. The first line grabs you. "Not the heat flames up and consumes,..." Heat. Passion. Love. Life. In seven words, Walt Whitman grabs the reader and launches him/her into a world of passion and life. You can feel the heat on your face. You can hear the waves crashing on the shore. (As in the second line.) You can taste the summer on your tongue and see the seeds blowing in the breeze. And then he goes on to say that none of these are as consuming, as "burning for his love whom I love...." He loves this unnamed man with so much passion you can still feel it almost 150 years later. In 'Once I Pass'd through a Populous City', you see the same passion (though clearly only for a short time) as in 'Live Oak', only this time for a young woman.

At the same time that 'Live Oak' shows you passion in love, 'Trickle Drops' shows you passion in loss. 'Trickle Drops' can be taken several different ways. If you take the literal sense, the poem is all about blood. "Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving! O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,..." But taken in the figurative sense, it's about the loss of someone you love, about letting them go free. It has to be someone you love, not like. For someone you just liked, you wouldn't shed blood to free them, but for someone you love, you would. "...From wounds made to free you whence you were prison'd, From my face, from my forehead and lips, From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd, press forth red drops,

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