In my previous Penguin Little Black Classics post, I had mentioned that meeting the author of the tenth classic seems to be destined. I have been a serious reader for about three decades now and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has been one of the books that has been recommended to me countless times by well meaning friends and colleagues. So it has been on my list for years. And if it wasn’t poetry, by now I would’ve definitely met Whitman much earlier.

I’m not much for poetry. Or at least, that is what I had believed.

The previous volume, Three Tang Dynasty Poets, had surprised me. I found myself enjoying poems that carried stories within them. Wang Wei’s hidden paradise, Li Bai’s sailor’s wife and Du Fu’s sword dance all gave me something familiar to hold on to. But then the image that stayed with me after finishing that collection, the lone gull drifting between sky and earth, was definitely poetic. Now came Walt Whitman. This little volume is a selection from Leaves of Grass, divided into two sections: Birds of Passage and Sea Drift.

The opening poem, Song of the Universal, left me puzzled.

Whitman speaks about science, the soul, humanity and the universe in one sweeping movement. I kept waiting for the poem to arrive at a destination, wondering where exactly he was taking me. It felt less like a poem than a mind thinking aloud.

The next one was Pioneers! O Pioneers! And I found how to read him.

Somewhere in the middle of that poem I had a small realization. Perhaps Whitman wasn’t interested in writing poetry in the way I had come to expect poetry. In a sense it felt as if he wasn’t much for poetry either. I suddenly realized that the poem could’ve been a speech without making a lot of changes. And that changed the poem for me, and it changed Whitman for me.  Once I stopped expecting conventional poetry, the poem suddenly became much easier to read.

I could almost imagine Whitman standing before a gathering, urging a young nation forward.

“O pioneers!”

The repetition feels like an exhortation to rally people toward a shared future.

That shift in perspective changed the entire reading experience. Instead of looking for carefully crafted poetic images, I began listening to a voice. The poems started to read like a stream of consciousness, spoken aloud and arranged into verses.

It also made me wonder why Whitman chose verse at all. Why not simply write essays or speeches?

I don’t have an answer to that yet. Perhaps his generation still expected ideas to be sung as much as spoken.

As I continued through Birds of Passage, another pattern emerged. Poems like Antecedents, Year of Meteors and A Broadway Pageant seemed less concerned with individual experiences than with America itself. They read almost like episodes in the story of a young country discovering its identity.

The pioneers moving westward. The great public events. The labour of ordinary people. The confidence of a nation still being imagined.

Reading them together, I had the distinct feeling that Whitman was attempting something much larger than a collection of poems. It was as though he wanted America to have its own epic voice.

Then the second half of the book began.

Sea Drift opens with Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and this Whitman is different. Here was a poem much closer to the poetry I thought I knew.

A boy listens to the songs of two birds nesting by the sea. One day the female bird disappears, and the male calls endlessly for her return. The sea becomes a presence in the poem, answering in its own mysterious way.

Partway through the poem I had to stop and look up “Paumanok.” Once I realised it was Whitman’s name for Long Island, the poem changed completely. The ocean was no longer merely a setting, and the island was no longer simply geography. He refers to them as Mother and Father.

That relationship became even clearer in As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life. By then, the sea and the land had become living companions rather than scenery.

After that there are some shorter poems. I will talk about the two which are memorable because this little collection is named after them.

In On the Beach at Night, a child watches clouds cover the stars and begins to cry, fearing that the heavens themselves have disappeared. The father gently explains that the clouds are temporary. The stars will outlast them.

It is such a simple scene, yet it quietly transforms into a meditation on permanence and change.

The title poem, On the Beach at Night Alone, returns to the idea with which Whitman had opened the collection. This time it’s a woman on the beach. And Whitman speaks of a great similitude that encompasses everything – living and non-living, worlds seen and unseen, all held together in a single order.

Reading these final poems, I found myself thinking back to Song of the Universal with which this collection opened. At the beginning of the book, Whitman’s attempts to embrace the whole universe had seemed almost overwhelming. By the end, after walking beside him through pioneers, oceans, birds, history and childhood, the same ambition felt much more natural.

Maybe that is how it is with poetry.

One unexpected thought stayed with me after closing the book. I used to think I wasn’t much for poetry. I approached poems cautiously because stories were familiar territory. And now after reading Hopkins, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu and Walt Whitman, maybe I have started to get a sense of it. Maybe becoming a poetry reader is not something that happens all at once. And maybe by the time I’m done with all the eighty slim volumes in the box set, I’ll start appreciating it better.