Summary and Form
Following “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” this poem is another newcomer
to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. If “Out
of the Cradle” describes the birth and adolescence of a poet, then
“As I Ebb’d” poem is one of mid-life crisis. This is Whitman’s “Dejection
Ode,” the place where he faces up to the fact that
his poetry might not be doing what he wants it to be doing.
The occasion of the poem is a walk along the beach, during
which the narrator is “seeking types” and trying to create poetry.
Suddenly he is struck by massive doubt, and sees his poetry as a
manifestation of ego that approaches neither the universal nor his
fundamental self. He sees the shore as a place of wrecks and corpses strewn
on the sand, and realizes that he himself will be no more than debris
someday.
Commentary
The center of this poem is Whitman’s assertion that “I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am, / But that before
all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold,
altogether unreached... / ...I have not really understood any thing,
not a single object, and...no man ever can.” By trying to write
poetry he has opened himself up to attack, both by external forces—cruel
nature, his fellow man—and by internal doubts. The imagery of this
poem reflects the ruin that he feels awaits him: scum, scales, and
corpses litter the beach.
What is truly remarkable about the poem, though, is that
Whitman, like Coleridge before
him, is able to turn the dejection and the imagery of ruin into
poetry. While he may end in ruin, and his poetry may be nothing
but garbage on the beach, here he is writing poetry about the junk
on the beach before him. It is a part of the world too. While he
may be failing in his attempts to understand himself and the world,
Whitman is nonetheless creating something that may last, even if
just as refuse.
The attack on his own ego in this poem is a direct result
of the kind of perspective gained at the end of “Out of the Cradle.”
Faced with death and decay Whitman must admit his own relative smallness
in the face of the universe. While this has left him with some hope
at the end of the earlier poem, here he explores its darker consequences.
Since he must admit that death will rob him of the chance even to
fully know himself, he cannot see any way to possibly comment on
the whole of the universe. He is left in the position of merely
asking later generations to heed his wreck.
