Poetry Friday -- Walt Whitman

Unsplash photo by Echo Grid

First this:

Poetry Ruined My Life

From the essay: 

I still have the Leaves of Grass that dad gave me for Christmas in ninth grade. “Whitman loved much that you love—beauty, openness, honesty, freedom, nature. Inside here is his “Song of the Open Road.” You are entering your open road years. Demand much of them; give them fully of yourself and you will have come to terms with being.”

Then, this:

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (INCIDENTAL COMICS)


And some more Walt Whitman on Zen Pencils, just for good measure.



Irene has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Live Your Poem.

Poetry Friday -- The Stars

Flickr Creative Commons photo by JosMetadi

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
by Walt Whitman


When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

We are learning about the Solar System in science, and while the facts about the planets are intriguing, it's the students' questions and wonderings that are the most compelling. (How I wish we could have had a sleepover at school this week so that we all could have watched the lunar eclipse together!) They are grappling (and rightly so) with the sheer vastness of our galaxy...and the universe, and with the ways scientists can know distances between or temperatures on the sun and the planets. We watched this video of a hexagonal hurricane on Saturn and they were fascinated by the way the scientists replicated the storm in the lab. The idea that scientists build models to explain and understand the world is new to them.

I need to write about our Genius Hour at some point. What I'm aiming for, but not achieving (YET) is for the work they do each Friday afternoon to come from their own curiosity and desire to explore. I'm beginning to understand, at the ground level, the data that shows that school dampens a child's natural curiosity. What I'm hoping to see, over the course of this year, is that it can be reignited, with time and scaffolding.

I'm hoping for students who would rather slip out of my classroom and look up "in perfect silence at the stars."

In a change of venues, Tricia has the Poetry Friday Roundup today at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Poetry Friday -- O Me! O Life!

O Me! O Life! By Walt Whitman O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities fill'd with the           foolish; Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish           than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light--of the objects mean--           of the struggle ever renew'd; Of the poor results of all--of the plodding and sordid crowds           I see around me; Of the empty and useless years of the rest--with the rest           me intertwined; The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these,           O me, O life?                                   Answer. That you are here--that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute           a verse. *    *    * Yes, that powerful play is going on, and we are careening hurtling rushing through these last days, through this last act, through this last verse of the song we've been singing since last August. Almost time for the curtains to close, for the conductor's baton to lower. What tracks will we leave in these children's lives? On these children's hearts? Irene has the Poetry Friday roundup today at Live Your Poem...

Poetry Friday -- Walt Whitman Explains the Water Cycle

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,

Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,

Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed,

and yet the same,

I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,

And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;

And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,

and make pure and beautify it;

(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,

Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)

by Walt Whitman

from Leaves of Grass

published in The Nature Company's FROM THIS SOIL: SELECTED POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN

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The round up this week is at Becky's Book Reviews.

The schedule of round ups is in the sidebar here.

More about Poetry Friday is here.

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