Martha reads Walt Whitman’s poem “On the Beach at Night, Alone.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Walt Whitman, “On the Beach at Night, Alone””
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. These days I keep going back again and again to poems, and particularly poems that involve the natural world. And I wanted to share one by Walt Whitman.
It’s called On the Beach at Night Alone. And it starts out on the beach with an image of the ocean as mother, and then it expands.
On the beach at night alone, as the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, as I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all. All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, all distances of place, however wide, all distances of time, all inanimate forms, all souls, all living bodies, though they be ever so different or in different worlds, all gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, all nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, all identities that have existed or may exist on this globe or any globe, all lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, this vast similitude spans them and always has spanned and shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
Beautiful. In other words, Grant, we’re all more connected than we think.
Sure. It also sounds like he laid the groundwork for thinking about science fiction, what humans would be like on other planets.
Everywhere. Everywhere. It’s all connected. The vast similitude. Walt Whitman on the beach. Alone. Alone.
If you’ve got a poem you’d like to share with us, something favorite, send it an email to words@waywordradio.org or read it into our voicemail at 877-929-9673.
