Journal #39 Bardic Symbols

Walt Whitman's poem, "Bardic Symbols" is pretty much about a main character who is going back and forth between his mother (ocean) and his father (land). The main character is drift wood.

"As I wend the shores I know not,
As I listen to the dirge, the voices of men and women wrecked,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
At once I find, the least thing that belongs to me, or that I see or touch, I
know not;
I, too, but signify a little washed-up drift,—a few sands and dead leaves to
gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the leaves and drift" (Bardic).

As this quote shows, the narrator (main character) is drifting between his mother and father like children do. During the course of a person's life, they drift back and forth between their mother and father seeking advice from either of them. This portrays the Everyman because in everyone's life they go back and forth between their parents. They not only do it in their childhood, being the mommy or daddy's girl or boy, but they also do it within their whole lives.

In William Dean Howell's review of the Bardic Symbols he is very confused. William Dean Howell pretty much says that the reader cannot interpret the Bardic Symbols, but you pretty much can because in class we said that the symbols could represent a father, mother, and child. His opinion is said below:

"No one, even after the fourth or fifth reading, can pretend to say what the "Bardic Symbols" symbolize. The poet walks by the sea, and addressing the drift, the foam, the billows and the wind, attempts to force from them, by his frantic outcry, the the [sic] true solution of the mystery of Existence, always most heavily and darkly felt in the august ocean presence. All is confusion, waste and sound. It is in vain that you attempt to gather the poet's full meaning from what he says or what he hints. You can only take refuge in occasional passages like this, in which he wildly laments the feebleness and inefficiency of that art which above all others seeks to make the soul visible and audible" (Howell).

Works Cited:

"Bardic Symbols." Atlantic Monthly 5 (April 1860): 445-447. Revised as "Leaves of Grass. 1" in Leaves of Grass (1860) and reprinted as "Elemental Drifts," Leaves of Grass (1867). The final version of the poem, "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life," was published in Leaves of Grass (1881–82).

[Howells, William Dean]. ""Bardic Symbols"." The Daily Ohio State Journal (28 March 1860): 2.