`Waiting for You'

School field trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art were annual events beginning in third grade, and I retain vivid memories of lapis lazuli and a particularly ugly Rauschenberg collage (“Gloria”). The visits continued even into high school, and I remember being impressed when a classmate I hardly knew, John Zill, bought a copy of George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty in the museum gift shop. I lied and said I had already read it.

One of the blessings of the Internet is its potential for substantiating or discrediting memory. I’ve carried around for decades a nebulous image of Walt Whitman glimpsed in the museum, a print or engraving of the poet in his Old Testament mode, on display in a glass case. Like the half-remembered lyrics of a song, the recollection idly flits through my mind, causes mild consternation and evaporates.

This week I’ve been reading Prose Works 1892: Volume II, part of The Collected Works of Walt Whitman, fat volumes published in 1964 by New York University Press (original price: $10). In 1886, an editor at the New Orleans Picayune, after hearing Whitman had once visited the city, asked the poet for his recollections. Whitman responded with an anecdotal memoir, “New Orleans in 1848,” published by the paper on Jan. 25, 1887. I was pleased to discover the following passage, describing a stop on his way back to New York from New Orleans:

“June 12. -- We stopped last evening in Cleveland, and though it was dark, I took the opportunity of rambling about the place; went off in the heart of the city and back to what appear’d to be the court-house. The streets are unusually wide, and the buildings appear to be substantial and comfortable. We went down through Main Street and found, some distance along, several squares of ground very prettily planted with trees and looking attractive enough. Return’d to the boat by way of the lighthouse on the hill.”

I knew Emerson and Thoreau had passed through my home town but it was pleasing to learn Whitman had visited, too, a mere 104 years before my birth. The connection is attenuated but real, and it revived my memory of Walt’s image at the museum. With a single search I found the lithograph I remembered, created by Boardman Robinson (1876-1952) in 1920. There it was: The foamy corona of white beard and hair, the gleaming dome, the demeanor of a dyspeptic Santa Claus -- an uncertain memory vindicated, as Whitman had promised in the concluding lines of “Song of Myself”:

“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”