Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Moby Dick, with the malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelinglytransplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleatedhead lengthwise beneath the boat … lying on his back, in the mannerof a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full withhis mouth.Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a distance… when his vast wrinkled forehead rose some twenty or morefeet out of the water.For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, andso planetarily swift that the ever-contracting circles he made, that heseemed horizontally to be swooping upon them.Walt WhitmanWhitman takes up the large, universal rhythms of the sea as seenfrom the shore, its vastness disappearing into the horizon, its great pulse ofebb and flow varying, but always giving witness of the never-ceasing life ofthe planet. The long lines of his poems, built often of countless namings andcitations, widen our vision to cosmic distances, and lists of details weavefor us a mood that bemuses and calms the soul. I imagine him chanting hispoems as he creates them beside the waves of the Atlantic. Their rhythms donot have the usual regularity of poetic lines, but rather swell and diminishedwith the fluidity and force of the ocean itself, a happening in Nature he seesrepeated in the realm of the human soul in such a way that it may suggestto us a like gesture in a still vaster world as in:A NOISELESS, PATIENT SPIDERA noiseless, patient spider,I mark’d, where on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.And you, O my soul, you stand,Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space.Ceaselessly musing, venturing throwing,—seeking the spheres, toconnect them;Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchorhold;Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.232