Now, let’s begin our journey through time, space, and writing with a poetry explication.
You may be wondering Boi, why though? Fret not, for I have reasons for thee, sweet reader.
Firstly, I enjoy poetry. At Writer to Writer, we’re all about exploring different modes and forms. How better to impress this upon an audience than through the exploration of this often-polarizing style of writing?
Secondly, I find that poetry is strangely under-appreciated among the masses composing our generation. (I apologize for this generalization and the generalizations to come.) Our generation openly expresses a preference for bite-sized information (e.g. the Skimm and Twitter). I even had an English professor once stress to my class the importance of splitting a larger paragraph into many smaller ones to engage the modern reader more effectively. But, while poetry is often bite-sized (as compared to novels, movies, etcetera), it is not often consumed by undergraduates. The mode seems to make people uncomfortable.
And this ties into my third and final reason–poetry expresses its author’s perspective through a different mechanism than, say, creative nonfiction. The discomfort with it, I think, stems from readers’ potential to “fail at understanding” a piece of poetry. Because a poem houses so much information in so few words, it may require multiple readings to comprehend. The thing that readers often forget is this: you do not have to “get” a poem; you need only allow yourself to feel its power.
However, since most readers feel more comfortable with poetry when they understand it, I wanted to provide a brief poetry explication. I’ll be walking readers (and myself) through one of the poems in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, titled “This Compost.”*
*This explication is based in my own opinions regarding the meaning of the poem; it is not “correct” or “incorrect,” but rather a perspective on the piece.
This Compost
By Walt Whitman
I Something startles me where I thought I was safest; I withdraw from the still woods I loved; I will not go now on the pastures to walk: I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea; I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me. O how can it be that the ground does not sicken? How can you be alive, you growths of spring? How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations; Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day—or perhaps I am deceiv’d; I will run a furrow with my plough—I will press my spade through the sod, and turn it up underneath; I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
II Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces tipward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs, The new-born of animals appear–the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk–the lilacs bloom in the door-yards; The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea, which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean, forever and forever. That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the orange-orchard —that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
III Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
I will break my explication into parts. First, let’s address who our speaker is in “This Compost.”
I would argue that the speaker is someone with a zealous appreciation for nature–he loves it. His love is expressed in a sometimes-sexualized way: the speaker calls the sea his “lover” and talks of stripping down to touch his “flesh” to the flesh of the Earth; he is willing to bare his self to the Earth, totally vulnerable.
In contrast, the speaker is also quite misanthropic–he speaks only of the “drunkards” and “gluttons” among the multitude of bodies that have been lain to rest.
Now we must determine the poem’s listener or intended audience. In the first canto, the Earth serves as the audience. The speaker addresses the “growths of spring” and the “blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain” as “you.” These plants compose the natural world. Then, in the second stanza, the speaker uses the pronoun “you” in reference to corpses’ burial ground, asking whether “every continent” of the Earth has been polluted with “sour dead.” In conclusion, he not only asks questions of nature, but of the entire natural environment that is Earth.
In the second canto, the audience is the speaker himself and whoever will listen. The canto opens with a “Behold!” This demand is made of no specific audience. However, the speaker (also) subtly pushes himself into the role of listener throughout the remainder of the poem. He works to convince himself that nature is not corrupted by the bodies beneath it, and he can commune with and be in nature as he once was: untouched by the sins of other humans.
Let’s move deeper into the substance of the poem. In “This Compost,” the speaker encounters a problem: he wants to be in nature but, although he originally thought himself “safest” there, he now worries that he will catch the “disease” of “drunkards and gluttons” (which I would equate, here, with general sin) whose bodies have been incorporated into the earth.
However, as we move into the second canto, we see the speaker recognizing that nature does not reflect what lies beneath it: “The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.” Throughout the canto, the speaker grows increasingly comfortable–again–with the Earth, proclaiming “That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body…/That it will not endanger me.”
In the third canto, the speaker comes to realize that nature continuously “distills” and “renews” itself, and, therefore, retains no connection with the deeds of past human lives. He is “terrified at the Earth” because of this; terrified with its power to achieve such renewal. In the speaker’s eyes, the Earth has taken on a divine character. It is terrifying in the same way that a God is terrifying to many.
Now that we have addressed our speaker, our audience, and the subject of “This Compost,” let us discuss the meaning(s) that might be derived from the poem. According to the speaker’s tone and his shifting perspective of nature (represented by the flow of the cantos), I would argue that he considers nature to be a much more powerful force than humanity. Only nature remains “clean forever and forever.” Perhaps it is the only living thing not susceptible to sin. It is in nature that the speaker seeks refuge from the sins of man.
Additionally, in contrast to the temporality of mankind, nature is eternal, with its cycle of crops; it experiences birth, death, and rebirth, daily.
I will end this explication with a question for your consideration: This poem highlights the speaker’s fear of sin and evil and often describes sin as a disease. Does the speaker think that sin can be “caught”? Much of Walt Whitman’s work speaks to a connection between humans. Is it this connection that allows for the transfer of sin? What would this potential to “catch sin” mean for our species, and why might Walt Whitman be exploring it in his poem?
If you’ve read this far, I appreciate your dedication to the cause! I hope that this explication has helped you understand and appreciate Walt Whitman’s “This Compost” more deeply.
Poetry is a beautiful mode, and one that should not be intimidating to undergraduates. Going forward, I encourage you to explore modes that you might not normally explore, whether that be through Writer to Writer or through other avenues! I do not doubt that an exploration like this can improve a writer’s ability writer, a reader’s ability to read, and a creative’s ability to create.
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 