Clearly Whitman is expressing his love of nature in the passages between pages 803 and 874. I thought all of his imagery was wonderfully depicted, and his words put me right there next to him. I loved how he went through an entire year of the different seasons, and the things that signify each season for Whitman. Having grown up in the North East myself, I could relate with so many of the images Whitman was explaining, and was travelling with him through the beauty and symbolism that every season represents.
However, I think what was really great for me as an active reader in these poems was all of the sounds that Whitman was describing. He talks about the swarming bees in the summertime. In the fall he observes the racing squirrel, reading himself for the winter. “No sound but the cawing of crows… their incessant cawing, far or near”, say Whitman. When Whitman travels to the Jersey Shore he says, “in sight of the ocean, listening to its hoarse murmur”, “with the ocean perpetual, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums” . In the winter he takes a boat across the Delaware back to Camden and says “The ice, sometimes in hummocks, sometimes floating fields, through which the boat goes crunching” . The following piece is called “Spring Overtures-Recreations, and it begins, “The first chirping, almost singing, of a bird today. Then I noticed a couple of honey-bees spiriting and humming about the open window in the sun…..The owl….. too-oo-oo-oo-oo”.
I could really go on and on and on with all of the imagery of sound that Whitman provides throughout these poems. Whitman uses sounds to differentiate every season. These poems are so audible, and touch me on such a personal level. All of these sounds are familiar to me, and all of them take me to a different place in my life.
For me, I think the most vivid sound, and one which Whitman describes, is that of the cicadas. As long as I can remember the sound of the cicadas has been the soundtrack of my summers. As Spring gets warmer and warmer, and school comes to an end, I always knew summer was approaching. But, the sound of the cicadas is the sound of summer. That first scorching hot day when you’re outside playing kickball and you hear the cicadas singing, you know that it truly is summer.
When I was in Thailand I stayed in a remote village outside of Chiang Mai. A bit more than a dozen of us, both locals and travelers made up the entire population of this hilltop village, where we sat around a fire smoking and listening to the one villager play hotel California over and over again on his guitar, because it was seemingly the only song he knew, when another native came over holding a cicada. He then proceeded to put the cicada in his mouth, and hold its wings between his teeth as the cicada sang its song. It may have been the craziest thing I have ever seen, and I think Whitman would have loved it, because it is probably as close to nature as one can ever get. The guy playing the guitar was no competition for the guy playing the cicada.
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