Through the Flaming Sword

Walt Whitman is, on and off, my favorite poet. It’s been Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wordsworth, Keats—but I keep coming back to Whitman. I think that “Song of Myself” is one of the great masterpieces of English-speaking literature; it’s very long and it has some mediocre sections, but some of it is truly transcendental.

And Whitman has strong Quaker connections. His mother and grandmother were Quakers. He grew up on Long Island and in Brooklyn in the midst of Quakers and was deeply influenced by Elias Hicks and late in life wrote an essay about him and George Fox.

And then yesterday, while continuing to work my way through Leaves of Grass, I read “An Old Man’s Thoughts of School: For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874” :

An old man’s thought of school,
An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot.

Now only do I know you,
O fair auroral skies—O morning dew upon the grass!

And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the soul’s voyage.

Only a lot of boys and girls?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a public school?

Ah, more, infinitely more;
(As George Fox rais’d his warning cry, “Is it this pile of brick and mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the church?
Why this is not the church at all—the church is living, ever living souls.”)

And you, America,
Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?
To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.