On the Beach at Night

Dear Reader,

I missed last Sunday because I was celebrating my daughter’s fourth birthday. My plan is to move the newsletter’s release to Mondays, which is easier for me, but in the meantime, I’d hoped to find a particularly good piece—especially one concerning fathers and children—to make up for the missed issue. Who better to consult for the perfect piece of literature than Walt Whitman (1819-1892)?

Whitman was an American writer and poet, best known for his groundbreaking 1855 work, Leaves of Grass, which he continued to revise until his death. In terms of importance and influence, Whitman stands alone among American poets. His devotees include everyone from Langston Hughes to Joy Harjo. Ralph Waldo Emerson described Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Ezra Pound called Whitman “America’s poet . . . He is America.” Esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom wrote:

Background

Whitman was a pioneer of free verse, an open form of poetry that eschews consistent meter, rhyme, and other recognizable patterns. Rather than rely on those formal elements, Whitman wrote in long, free-flowing verse paragraphs that were modeled on the long lines of the King James Bible.

He also wrote in accessible, non-allusive language, which accorded with his fervent belief in democracy and the wisdom and beauty of the common person.

This week’s poem, “On the Beach at Night,” employs both aspects of his style to describe a scene witnessed by Whitman’s speaker—possibly the poet himself—of a father and daughter walking on a beach at night, as clouds gather and threaten rain.

What It Offers

There’s no better poet of the cosmos than Whitman. He once wrote the immortal phrase, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,” and it is a recurrent theme within his poetry to link the celestial with the terrestrial, to connect heaven and earth. In this poem, Whitman aligns the father and daughter with Jupiter and the Pleiades. The gathering clouds seem to imperil the planet and stars in the same way that the rain they bring will cut short the walk on the beach, much to the child’s dismay.

There’s also another level of metaphor at work here. The “burial-clouds” seem to represent the daughter’s growing understanding of the ephemeral nature of all life—”[m]any the burials, many the days and nights, passing away”—including her father’s. She is crying not just because they will have to leave the beach and presumably go inside, but also because the deathly clouds “lower victorious soon to devour all.”

But Whitman’s speaker offers her comfort. “Something there is,” he says, “more immortal even than the stars[.]” The poem’s ending leaves this “something” somewhat ambiguous, but I think it’s pretty clear he’s talking about love, and in this context the love between a parent and child.

Love, the speaker asserts, will outlast the clouds and oblivion itself. And not only that, it will also endure beyond Jupiter (the king of the gods in Greek and Roman mythology), the Pleiades (daughters of the mighty Titan Atlas), and the “vast immortal suns" and the “long-enduring pensive moons.”

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