American Literature

Walt Whitmans poetry, from the very start to the finish, of Leaves of Grass, was known for its empathetic tone. The Sleepers, very much a part of the first edition of the book, turned out to be an extremely important poem in the edition. In a style thats simple, yet lyrical in its beauty, Whitman puts together disparate images and makes them come together for the reader, in what one can easily call a dream of a poem. The piece displays a poet that has evolved tremendously in his writing, and is still considered an absolute masterpiece.

At first glance, it would seem like Whitman rambles on about sleepers, exposing vulnerabilities and carefully hidden sides. On closely examining the nuances of the poem, we see that Whitman lends himself to several readings and interpretations. He oscillates from sleep to awakening, from the self to the many roles he makes the self portray, from innocence to sexual perversion of sorts, from clean images to sordid, Freudian undertones. All this magic, Whitman manages to pack into The Sleepers. The paper that follows will study the eight distinct parts of the poem that Whitman divides The Sleepers into, consider the most important image that is evident in each part and the primary idea that accompanies it.
In the first part of the poem, Whitman begins almost in a self-introductory mode as he describes to the reader what he is doing. The immediate image that is conjured is one of an apparition, that is making its way, swiftly and calmly through multiple places and people, as if simultaneously. Sometimes wrecked by curiosity, wrecked, confused, gazing, stopping, and sometimes just gripped by a certain disdain, this apparition seems to look on with certain awe or the lack of it at some points corpses, murderers, lovers, all sleep. Whitman, simply by listing the several roles in this first part, uses sleep extremely effectively as the ultimate leveller of people, class, creed and gender.
And yet, he does so without detracting from the extreme diversity of each of those roles and the way in which they lie beside each other. The reader is then immediately moved from a state of passive watching, to active participation. From just watching from a distance to pass my hands soothingly, pierce darkness, actively taking on the dreams of the dreamers he sees, ever-laughing , and playing mindgames with the journeymen. And then again, he reintroduces his theme of equality by stepping into multiple roles with the one costume he possesses sleep He slips into clean roles, grimy roles and finally ends with a sexually explosive role, all the while maintaining that sleep pervades all.
In the third part of the poem, Whitman makes a shocking transition. From siding with the old, almost empathetically, he moves into a section that openly mocks the arrogance of youth. Whitman begins by commenting on the sheer beauty and perfection of the swimmer, his admirable qualities of courage and persistence as he moves his white body in gripping charm  only to come to a sudden, brutal end. The harshness of his death, is vividly portrayed to the reader  head foremost on the rocks. Whitman literally dashes the youths head into a rock, in sadistic pleasure, only to mockingly later ask the waves why they crushed the prime of youth The poet reduces all that gigantic strength to nothing, in one dash. Making the gigantic swimmer turn into drops of blood, scattered into the expanse of the ocean, circling now, gone in an instant, out of sight.
In the next section of Whitmans poem, he addresses a nightmare that everyone has had to deal with  death. In this section, he chooses death in a shipwreck, and describes to the reader the utter helplessness that he is prone to bear if one were to conjure up images of crashing to death at sea. The inability to save oneself, to run away from the scene of the crime, to swim to the shore  the impossibilities of these actions are hard-hitting in this section of the poem and Whitman is a silent, morbid spectator  watching as the icy wind blows against perhaps a heart that shows the lack of warmth, the howls that pierce his ears but make no difference to him, and all he does his wring his fingers, and rush to the surf, to get wet To get a better view And through the dream of complete death that surrounds him Whitman chooses to stay alive, burrowing through corpses, piling them neatly in a manner that is almost robotic, and dealing with the guilt that accompanies such dreams  the guilt of being alive, while the world around him has died.
Keeping close to the boundaries of death, in the section that follows, Whitman heads into the blood-stained fields of war. He seems to describe the haunting nightmares of a soldier who has been prone to the utter injustice and pointlessness of war. All colour is drained from the cheeks, all emotion is turned into copious weeping, and for as long as the eye will stretch, he sees slaughter, and the faces of parents confiding in him about the death and the merciless killing of their sons. Once again, Whitman seems to allow the image of the survivor guilt to surface. Men all around him killed in war, but he continues to live.  At the tavern, the return of soldiers, the return of peace, is cause for celebration. But to the war-worn man, all the rejoicing boils down to nothing. The sounds refuse to jingle in his ears, the kisses refuse to make an impression, all he can seem to do is cry over all that has been lost, and bid farewell to a cause he once believed in. Except, even in his dream, he knows the farewell cannot right the wrong or undo the damage and slaughter caused.
In the sixth part of the poem, Whitmans sleeper moves into a story  a dream that has a beginning and an unending, haunting finish. Whitman describes the longing for beauty, the long last arrival of beauty, the sheer admiration and awestruck look of wonder at its appearance, its sudden disappearance and the longing that follows. Was the young girl who waited for a never-returning waif, the symbol of all dreams that are wrapped in hopelessness Whitman suggests to the reader that these dreams may be fed by mirages that appear out of nowhere and quickly disappear into nowhere. What purpose do they serve In the same section, Whitman tackles the very fount of hopelessness itself  that of Lucifer. Whitman comments on the abject oppression he can cause, the terror, the destruction , the captivity, the defiling acts that follow, and the derisive laughter as one watches the disappearance of the hopeless dream that never belonged.
In the last section of his poem, Whitman begins to delve not into incidents, but into feelings and intangible emotions. He begins with amour, jealousy, over and seasons. He talks of the joy of returning to the known and the familiar  of the sailor who finds his way back home, the unharmed fugitive and feelings of childhood. It seems like Whitman is digging into his past to dredge up emotions that are evocative of turning moments in his memory. Even through these emotions, he reiterates that nationality or creed or caste or gender, none of it play a role in an emotion as basic as returning home, dreams of returning home, to where the heart is, are common across people and places. And Whitman uses these lines to begin the setting to the end of his poem.
Ending the way he began, Whitman draws out the commonality that sleep bestows upon all of mankind, stating in words that cannot get clearer, I swear they are averaged now, one is no better than the other, night and sleep have likened them and restored them. Drifting into the intangible again, Whitman comments on the beauty of everything that Is dim, and the beauty of everything in the dim. He draws parallels from the most extreme circumstances, and finds a way to link the two the rotting skull and the newly born child, the black and the white, the father and the son,  the teacher and the student, the boy and the man, the paralyzed and the supple, and so on. 
Whitman, in his inimitable style, wraps up in a way that only he can. He picks the very theme he has focused to stretch to its limit, and pays his obeisance to it, giving it its due, staying in its beauty, dwelling in the solace it offers, seeking shelter from the richness of day and flowing from night to night, from dream to dream, some his, some others. In conclusion, Whitmans strongest image comes through of the night and dreams when he compares it as if to his mother, giving the night the right to produce life itself, making it the fount of everything there is, and acknowledging its power to create and nurture life in every form of existence.
The masterpiece that Whitman left can be fathomed in a million ways, but at the heart of this poem lies the theme of sleep and dreams, and the leveller that these two can be, the bond that they inadvertently form with all of mankind and the commonality that it introduces in all of us, irrespective of whether we choose to notice it or not. It is interesting to note that while he calls it the Sleepers, and focuses on the plural, what he chooses to do is to also zone in on the large individual that all of mankind really is.

TELL ALL THE TRUTH EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson spins a superb truth in her own poem on truth. With more than eighteen hundred poems written, of which less than a dozen were published, each of Emily Dickinsons poems were windows into her introverted soul, to say the least. And while she may have gone down in history as an introvert, she was an introvert with the deepest of insights into the human soul, its traditions and behaviours, its methods and ways.
And so it is with this poem as well.  One glance at the title, it seems like Dickinson is all set to write a preachy poem on how one should insist on telling the truth no matter what the circumstance or the audience. Tell all the truth Tell it always, to all you meet. But therein lies the most surprising part of this poem for me. The fact that the poem is titled tell all the truth, and in truth, all its saying is, tell anything but the truth. The irony of this poem lies in the fact that anything that is even a degree away from the truth, by default becomes a lie. And when Emily Dickinson makes her suggestion in the poem, to tell the truth a certain way, all shes really saying at the end of it, is telling her reader to lie.
The ease with which she justifies her claim to serve untruths is fascinating to take note of. In her first line, she gives truth a character, a posture of its own, a light-like quality, so to speak. And she insists that we tilt that character a little, we dont allow it to stand straight or be erect or shine directly into ones eye. Instead she urges the reader to look at truth from an angle, from a direction that is slant, to tilt ones head perhaps, for the human heart was never meant for head on collisions with truth.
Dickinson makes truth telling a game, and the art of telling it, a success or a failure. So she condones the art of going round in circles, beating around the bush, telling anything but the truth, for the success of telling the truth, lies in being able to steer clear of telling it, just by going around in circles. The poet offers us her reasons why this would be the most preferred method  simply because of our infirmities, our deep-rooted weaknesses that while outwardly claiming to want the truth, are in reality not ready for it, and may even be repulsed by it, its purity, its brightness and the shock and surprise that one would have to grapple with when met with faced in all its glory.
Dickinson likens truth to the way one would shield a child away from lightning. At first, the child would have to be taught about the phenomenon kindly, and bit by bit, allowed to watch it, eased into its brilliance, and then be able to watch it completely from a distance, never up front, or they would be blinded. And Dickinson says, so it is with truth, explanations ought to be gently dropped on the human soul, truth must be mildly told or it would just lead to blindness
In this poem, the aspect that most surprises me, is the fact that Emily Dickinson, talks about untruths and lies and white lies and mans tolerance for it, the prevalent existence of lies, while all the while, supposedly telling us to tell the truth Thats the surprise that took me by surprise.

EMILY DICKINSON I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY
Given that Emily Dickinson was a woman poet of her times, known to live life as a recluse, this poem in the context and setting that she must have written it in, lends itself to so many beautiful interpretations. The poem is no doubt an absolute work of art, simple in structure, limitless in meaning.
What I find most surprising about this poem, once again, is the absolute irony in the title of it. Dickinson begins by telling her story of living life as a thorough romantic, a dreamer, a creative, wandering soul, and that is her chosen path of possibility, that she prefers to tread. While she begins by talking about how she picks possibility over prose, the irony of the poem lies in the fact that there are limitless impossibilities in her chosen way of possibility
The poet describes her world to us, giving us a window into her home that is little by no stretch of imagination. For if the house she lives in is called possibility, then like she says, her windows are infinite in number and her doors are far superior than those of any other house on earth, or on realms beyond.
In place of rooms, she chooses cedars, towering trees of the strongest wood, fresh and clean and uplifting in nature, impenetrable, strong as you will it to be, indestructible by the human eye. For a roof she chooses for herself the vast expanse of sky, the gambrels of a blue starry stretch that no man or woman has seen the ends of. Is that a possibility No, surprisingly, thats the impossibility element that she tweaks into her lines, without actually saying the very word
Its a house fairer than prose, which could very well indicate the structured nature of prose or non-poetic writing  not so lyrical, staid in meaning and not prone to multiple definitions. Dickinson could be mocking the laws of her times as she condones possibility which could mean the magic of her poetry in this case, over the technical chasteness of prose.
Visitors in this house, she insists are simply the fairest of all the visitors that houses the world over will receive. Why Because stepping into a world of possibilities or impossibilities, makes one as much of a dreamer and hopeful romantic that Emily Dickinson portrays herself as in this poem. And it is only those who dare to dream the impossible possibilities that will dare to set foot into her house of non-prose, with the sky as the roof, and cedars as chambers.
Her preferred occupation she says is simply to do this spread narrow hands, that in a world of prose will not be able to grasp too much. But thats not the world that Emily lives in. In her world of possibility, her narrow hands can grasp paradise, and she gathers it and stows it away in her home set against the sky.
Another aspect of this poem that surprises me no end, is the fact that, although Dickinson was known to write a lot about death and leaving and the like, in this piece, she takes the optimistic, life-is-full-of-an-impossible-number-of-opportunities-route. The poem could be interpreted in feminist undertones, given the age she wrote in and what was expected of women definitely not fancy, flighty dreams and lines such as these. It could also go to mean an ode to death and heaven itself, considering she is gathering paradise.

EMILY DICKINSON I HEARD A FLY BUZZ WHEN I DIE

This is her forte Emily Dickinson, when she writes about death, as she has in so many of her poems, is truly in her morbid, melancholic, yet accepting element. Although she wrote extensively on the themes of death and dying, Dickinson never portrayed the theme as one she feared or hated. Instead she looked at it as something she had come to terms with, and often put herself in the role of the dying person or the dead.

She does just that, in this poem. She has died, and is probably hovering on earth in her spirit form, making her last mental notes to take away before she leaves earth altogether. She observes everything thats going on around her, the stillness except for the fly, everyone around her who had cried themselves dry, awaiting the king which could be a reference to God who would take her spirit out of the earth, or reference to a funeral service in a church or in a house of worship. She states matter of fact-ly, that her worldly possessions are taken care of, her keepsakes have been bequeathed, everything of her that she has left on this earth has been assigned to someone, her legacy left behind. And just as she is about to wipe her slate clean and move on, she is stopped in her tracks by the common fly. Otherwise considered a pesky creature, of no use to anyone, and generally annoying in nature  Dickinson chooses to use this creature to be her last point of contact before she sees the light, (perhaps heaven or God). And in those last moments, she is able to appreciate the beauty of Gods creation, it its blue, stumbling buzz, it its sky-like blue appearance, and draw succour from its clumsy journey around her, reminding her of her own journey into the next realm.

And again, Dickinson has managed to surprise me  by using the common fly as a work of creation and art that even a spirit, on its way out of the world, should pause and notice its beauty. She could have chosen to pass it off as an annoyance, especially since it was almost her last millisecond one earth. Yet the poet, chooses to teach us that even something as simple and inconsequential as the fly, has its part to play in our lives, its role in the bigger picture and not one little creature of the Kings creation is something that will go in vain.

While this is one way of looking at it, another way of considering the fly, is as a symbol of heaven itself. Given that the fly is described as blue, much like the sky where the heavens are attributed to, the fly serves as a reminder of the poets destination, or where she is headed. In that sense, this could be the image that Dickinson tries to convey through this poem.