Jamie G.'s Whitman Blog

Religious Transformation in Whitman’s “The Song of the Universal”

September 30th, 2009

Having completed my explication previous to reading Betsy Erkkila’s excerpts from Whitman the Political Poet, I was surprised to find that my findings in the poem, that the speaker of the poem begins the last section of the poem believing in the natural and ends this section with a prayer to a specific god, mimicked Whitman’s own religious transformation. While it isn’t necessarily a safe theoretical move to connect Whitman with the speaker of the poem, there is a definitive correlation. Whitman’s all inclusive, “every man,” attitude in the universalistic-nature of religion faded towards the end of his life and he focused instead on a more conservative religious view:

Physically paralysed and politically disillusioned, Whitman moves in “Prayer of Columbus.” as in “Passage to India.” toward a more traditional religious faith. Whereas the early Whitman had consistently railed against those religion systems that postulated a divine authority outside the self, in “Prayer of Columbus,” he utters his own prayer, yielding the authority of self and the command of the democratic ship to the divine “Steersman” in the sky. The gesture measures the distances between the early and late Whitman and the extent of his disillusionment with America’s experiment in democracy. (Erkkila 283-4)

Keeping this in mind, here is an excerpt from my extensive (11 pages extensive) explication. Note: the poem is 65 lines long, a 4-5 page explication could not have been done.

The speakers generalized inclusivity is short-lived, however, because in the next stanza America is separated from the rest of the world:

The measur’d faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past,

Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own,

Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,

All eligible to all. (ll. 48–51)

Related undoubtedly to the apparent lack of religion in the poem thus far, the speaker clearly delineates between American’s “religion” and the organized religions of the rest of the world in this stanza. The line “Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own” (l. 49) lends itself to the believe in the power of nature, like the imagery of the third section creates an impression of. The “religion” of nature excludes no one—“All eligible to all” (l. 51)—once again introducing inclusivity.

However, the last part of the poem completely deviates from this pattern of being all encompassing and singles out the poet in a relationship with a particular deity:

The fifth stanza of the poem, rather than leaving the reader with the previous imagery of fecundity, turns into a prayer between the speaker and an unidentified god-figure. I say unidentified because, as can be seen earlier in section four, the speaker has by-and-large rejected traditional formalized religion. Rather than the “scheme” being the sole controlling factor in the journey towards the idea, the speaker of the poem seems to have a change of heart:

Give me O God to sing that thought

Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith,

In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,

Believe in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space,

Heath, peace, salvation universal. (ll. 57–61)

This change from the language of the traditional “Muse” to a formalized “God” shows a change in the speaker of the poem that isn’t fully explained in the four sections of the poem. Is this “God” that the speaker addresses a means of speaking to the force of nature that is atypical? Or is this one of the many incongrueties of the poem as a whole?

It is because of these incongruities (this contradictory stance on religion only being one) that the poem generally fails to impart the reader with any sense of meaning.

While this may not be a radical revelation, I find it to be reassuring. I have never worked closely with any Whitman texts before, so seeing that my reading is not completely off-target is fortifying, to say the least.

Though I generally have a difficult time connecting myself to the criticism of Whitman’s works, Erkkila’s article seemed to be more accessible than a majority of the research we’ve read in the class. Perhaps it’s the connection with the historical that I find to be the key to making Whitman make sense, but that’s neither here nor there.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989. Print.
Whitman, Walt. “The Song of the Universal.” Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York, NY: The Library of America, 1996. Print.

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