Whitman’s “Autumn Rivulets” is a clustering of poems, loosely connected in theme and focus. The prevailing mood is one of wistful, yet ironic, reminiscence in the light of mature experience, a re-evaluation of things past from the perspective of age and disintegration.
Whitman has used this convergence of maturity and youth before, with much success, in the poem”Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” originally published in 1859 under the title “A Child’s Reminiscence.” In “Autumn Rivulets,” he toys with the time-values implicit in the word “reminiscence”: the present interpreted by the experience of the past, an ironic counterpoint most fittingly encapsulated in the memorable image of the”old crone rocking the cradle” (l.182-253). This idea that birth is overshadowed by age, spring by autumn remains an implicit theme in “Autumn Rivulets.” Two spring motifs that play on this variation in the collection are the child and the compost.
The Spring Motif of Child in “Autumn Rivulet”
In “The Child that Went Forth,” third poem in the collection, Whitman places the child’s innocence within the context of his parents’ jaded experience. The child has absorbed the spring of life—the lilacs, morning glories, bird songs, even the march lambs and sow’s litter. As the poem progresses, the child goes forth to absorb other not so spring like experiences—the old drunkard staggering home, quarrelsome boys, the strict schoolmarm, and all the “changes of city and country”(l.17). His parents become part of that experience: his mother’s quiet nurture, his father’s unjust tempers, family politics and “usages” (l.26), family bickering and deceit, family yearnings and doubts.
Whitman’s blunt rendition of family life spills into the streets which invade the child with the flotsam of a soul-sapping port—vehicles, planked wharves, ferries. The child absorbs all these as well as the sea drifts by the horizon’s edge; standing before the water, he watches the flying sea-crow and smells the fragrance of “salt marsh and shore mud” (l.39-40). Standing at the horizon’s edge, the child is both old and young, a reminiscence of spring within the context of autumnal maturity.
The Spring Motif of Compost in “Autumn Rivulet”
In “The Compost,” sixth poem in the collection, Whitman reverses the position of spring and autumn. The poem begins with a question: how is it that earth, filled with “distemper’d corpses,” (l.9) does not sicken man? The answer comes in the form of a deliberate reversal of spring and autumn: the decomposing corpses within the compost are given a second reprieve, a new beginning, when they sprout from their rottenness “the grass of spring” (l.19).
This veritable resurrection of nature disinfects all the foulness that preceded it. The earth, Whitman muses,” grows such sweet things out of such corruptions” (l.44). Though the child may indeed be overshadowed by the crone, he is also the one who can break through the old order into a new song. Overwhelmed by the miraculous in nature, the poet recognizes the irony implicit in its chemistry: “every spear of grass rises out of what was once/ a catching disease”(l. 41-42).
Whitman is well aware of his responsibility as the poet of America. In his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, he points to the poet’s power to reminiscence--to “form the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is” (716).
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Eds. Blodgett, Harold W. and Sculley Bradley. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1965.
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