For my post, I am going to explore both “Going Somewhere” and “Continuities” and continue a conversation we had about how both life and death can be transformed into something else, such as nature. Both poems seem to speak to the idea that life is always moving forward; “onward, onward” life is not a stagnant unmoving force… it is an “endless march”. This seems to be a resonating Whitman theme as we have seen these types of ideas in earlier works. Change, revolution, movement, etc, appear frequently. “Going Somewhere” exemplifies how death can be transformed into something beautiful, as soon as “spring’s invisible law returns,/With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn”. Specifically, the words “spring” and “fruits” seem to translate as rebirth.
I always like to come back to someone else’s comment on one of our blogs (although I am summarizing now) that a thing, whether that be a person or a part of nature must first degrade in order to be regenerated in a way. I love the idea that this cycle exists in many of Whitman’s poems–the degradation or crises of one thing that leads to the renewal and regeneration of the same, or completely different thing. Nothing is ever “lost” because it is constantly, or “continually” being shifted and transformed and changed. The sun always “rises for mornings and for noons/continual”. There is always a new day…the sun will always rise again…”there is always light somewhere”, to reference my previous discussion of “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski.
I enjoyed your reading of Continuity; I had a similar reading of it in terms of rebirth. I kind of read it as reincarnation. However, I did not really consider that the rebirth could give way to something stronger and more powerful than it had been before. When I read it, I thought Whitman suggested that things will be and always have been as they were. In a metaphorical sense, the tree that loses its leaves in the fall can return in the spring with more blossoms and leaves than it had before.
As I noted in another comment, I enjoyed out conversation in class when we pushed back a bit against this optimistic sense of re-birth that is so evident in these late poems. By pressing on them a bit, we began to see some shadows come in as well, which doesn’t make them failed attempts at optimism in light of the deficits of age, but rather more interesting and complex ones.