Review of Whitman Song of the Open Road

From "The Distillation Would Intoxicate Me Also," a series of seven Walt Whitman beer reviews

We're currently living in an united nations-Whitmanic world. "Camerado, I give you lot my mitt!" our poet proclaims in "Vocal of the Open Road" (1856), and nosotros're likely to ask him when he terminal done it. The road isn't really "open" now, save for essential travel, though nosotros still "enter upon [information technology] and look effectually." Its emptiness haunts us, eerie every bit ruins; its future is distant, uncertain, and delayed. "I believe you are not all that is here," Whitman writes, sweet-talking the street in his familiar 2nd person, "I believe that much unseen is besides here." That'd be the miasma of infection, invisibly pressed into benches and track. Information technology keeps us from feeling "[a]foot" or "lighthearted," "[h]ealthy" or "costless."

The coronavirus, in short, has upended American Romanticism. It rewrites its time-tested poems. Information technology flips the whole hopeful enterprise on its head. We are interconnected, as Emerson and Whitman take long told u.s., but in a dangerous, epidemiological sort of style. "I volition scatter myself amongst men and women equally I go," Whitman boasts, and I first to wonder if my neighbors or postman followed his lead. Whitmanic "adhesiveness"—his term for masculine amore—sounds downright contagious. Imagination'south no amend. That Romantic lodestar won't lead me to God or my inner child if I use it to count out the doorknobs between my kid and the next confirmed case.

At least there's beer, sales of which (unsurprisingly) spiked as the stay-at-home orders went out. Drunkenness sounds more doable when driving's off limits. Could drunkenness relieve Romanticism, vis-à-vis one of Romanticism'due south more than troubling charms? I'm thinking of the link between intoxication and inspiration. I'm thinking of Coleridge ingesting opium and writing "Kubla Khan" and of the Beats, those latter-day Romantics, who boasted of benders and Benzedrine-fueled books. I'd love to get drunk, write poems, and wait out a vaccine. I'd love to open the doors of perception while throwing my deadbolt tightly shut. But let'southward be honest. Alcohol rarely leads to great poems.

Can poems, though, lead to dandy booze? If I've learned anything from Bell's Brewery's Leaves of Grass serial, it's that the answer is yes. And poetry itself—its Tweeted recitation, its solitary reading—is an intoxicant worth your quarantined time. Enter "Song of the Open Road," the 5th beer to gloat Whitman's bicentennial. Bell's describes it as a "Wintertime Warmer Ale," though I'm sipping information technology as spring starts to have off. It's malty and sweetness, like bread and molasses. It's a boozy brown ale (8.5% ABV), like a Belgian Dubbel. I don't recommend day-drinking information technology between Zoom calls. Better to let it melt you into a postprandial armchair; it pairs nicely with oversized books.

But how does it pair with its eponymous verse form? That depends, I suppose, on which "Song of the Open Road" you lot read. Do yous drink it and think of Kerouac, perennial hitchhiker, quoting this verse form as he starts his On the Road scroll? Can it recall to a free-wheeling, pre-pandemic U.S.? Or does reading it at present link it to the now? Last January I taught this poem (and that novel) to a score of smart and curious students. Today they're dispersed to the ends of so many open roads. (I miss them.) This winter warmer warms me as I accept that reality. Information technology helps me to recoup some of the poem'southward marvelous lines. Here's a favorite: "I did not know that I held so much goodness."

I know that this beer's good. I know that this poem is too. And I know that, in reciting this poem aloud, I feel close to a poet who turns 201 this May. "Will yous give me yourself?" Whitman asks in this poem'southward penultimate line, "volition y'all come up travel with me?" Recitation assures me that I already have. Information technology makes my natural language, lungs, and lips move merely equally the poet's did when he wrote the lines. I used to imagine this equally an erotic matrimony, a transhistorical kiss predicated on our unchanging anatomical forms. That's withal true, just today information technology's something more. It'southward a respite from the necessity of social altitude. It'southward a fleck of goddamn magic in the midst of maddening days.

"Song of the Open Route" is a verse form as enthralled with people as it's enthralled with place. At its best, information technology illustrates how place matters because of the people who trod it. It even makes place into a person, simply to make sure nosotros get the signal:

You rows of houses! you window-pierc'd façades! y'all roofs!
You lot porches and entrances! you copings and atomic number 26 guards!
Yous windows whose transparent shells might betrayal so much!
Your doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You lot gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has touch'd you I believe you lot have imparted to yourselves, and now would
impart the aforementioned secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits
thereof would exist evident and amicable with me.

If at that place'southward a passage I'd offering yous, Dear Reader, every bit consolation for our collective upheaval, this would be it. The road'southward familiarly unpopulated. The voyeuristic thrill of peering through windows is one you might share. I know that I'thouentranced by those "transparent shells" as I walk in the evening. I know too that a video conference opens the blinds on my co-workers' homes. (Even the virus is foreshadowed—in "all that has touch'd you" that you lot'll now "impart […] secretly" to another.) All the same, in that location are people everywhere in this stanza, the residual "spirits" lingering on porches and stoops. They are "axiomatic and amicable"; they return me to this poem's optimistic intent.

Which is what, exactly? To show us that roads are public and democratic. To prove that this individualist nation is nevertheless rooted in a people, a we. To remind u.s., on our next constitutional (apologies!), that our fellow citizens "impart" themselves into the soles of our shoes. "Vocal of the Open Route" is to pavement what "Song of Myself" is to grass; each poem invests a mute surface with mutual love. They tell us we've got visitor even when nosotros're alone. Whitman called this a "religious poem in the truest and best sense of the term." I struggled with that description until, sometime effectually Easter, it clicked: the trunk of Christ is reborn in public works.

One need not, of course, be religious to like this one. God knows—or doesn't—that I'm not. My first favorite poet was A.E. Housman. He assumed that championship on the day that I read, in a center school Language Arts textbook, the give-and-take for what I am and he was: atheist. It didn't have long earlier I bought a copy of A Shropshire Lad (1896) and came across this couplet:

And malt does more than Milton tin
To justify God'south means to human.

"Song of the Open up Route" isn't explicitly Christian, but it is transcendental. It asks us to believe in—and transcend toward—concepts larger than ourselves. At that place are plenty worth the endeavor. Like commonwealth or the American Due west. Similar verse or public health. Similar actually skillful beer. I'm not certain if Housman was feeling pro-pint or anti-Puritan when he wrote these lines. I'one thousand guessing he enjoyed taking the piss out of poesy itself. Fair enough. In xviii months, I only might join in the laugh. But right at present, with cities at a standstill and my social circle confined to my domestic dog, I need poetry. Large surprise, I know, merely poesy—and particularly Romantic poetry—offers the company I lack. As Wallace Stevens, a latter-day Romantic, famously said, the poet'southward function "is to help people to live their lives." It nevertheless does, and that's why Romanticism will survive COVID-19. That and birds.

Last week my brother chosen me from the wilds of Arizona. My brother's an ornithologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. He called to tell me to start listening. To the trees. To rooftops. As the dawn broke. At twilight when the bugs flit near similar fat snacks. The reason? Because birds will sing more conspicuously and beautifully this bound than they have in years, he said. They won't take to compete with cars on the road or planes in the sky. I thought of the robin nesting in a downspout's articulation near my window. I idea of Shelley's skylark, Keats'south nightingale, and Whitman'southward hermit thrush. I thought of Dickinson's famous verse form reclaiming Sunday for the Earth (F236):

Some proceed the Sabbath going to Church building –
I go on it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

The pandemic cannot, in short, rewrite the natural earth, and for those of united states "staying at Dwelling" there'south much holiness left to observe. This as well is within Romanticism'southward purview; nature feels all the more than essential when so much of culture's close down. The bobolink, for instance, trills like a piccolo, ecstatic and rollicking. You can listen for it in your backyard or public park. You tin can imagine the branches like high rafters that change color as they bloom. And you can be sure that somewhere a poet is writing information technology all downwards.

Bell's "Song of the Open Route" may notwithstanding be available at your local bottle shop. Phone call alee. Buy it curbside. Drink it at home. Cheque out the Kenyon Review Online for the rest of my reviews—at that place will exist 7 in all—of Bell'southward Leaves of Grass Series. And click over to the Massachusetts Review for Marsha Bryant's fine take on this same beer, "Song of the Open Road."

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Source: https://kenyonreview.org/2020/05/song-of-the-open-road-the-beer/

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