`Wing'd Purposes'

Whitman was a master of portraiture. Section 13 of “Song of Myself” begins with the speaker (Whitman, or a reasonable facsimile) admiring the grace of a black man at the reins of four horses pulling a stoneyard wagon – difficult, dangerous work almost certainly never before celebrated in literature. Also unprecedented is a black lauded for “polish’d and perfect limbs,” whose “glance is calm and commanding.” Whitman goes on to say he “love[s]” the driver, “and I do not stop there,/I go with the team also.” Next, Whitman described himself as “the caresser of life” – any life, animal or plant (leaves of grass), human or nonhuman, male or female. The pose is extraordinary, though we know from letters and conversations that Whitman was hardly an unambiguous Abolitionist. The cause of the Civil War for Whitman as for Lincoln was principally preservation of the Union not opposition to slavery. Section 13 moves from workman and horses to another beast of burden, oxen. Of them he writes:

“…what is it that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

Now comes the passage that occurred to me on Saturday, late in the afternoon, when an astonishing bird showed up in our backyard:

“My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.

“I believe in those wing'd purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.”

Through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house I saw something dark land on the patio. The bird was larger than a robin, slightly smaller than a crow and had a tufted crest. Its head and upper breast were crow-black and the rest of him was a deep iridescent blue that reminded me of Christmas ornaments. With the raggedy tuft it looked like a kingfisher, but we live miles from water. This bird had come to feed on the mix of cracked corn and seed I put out for the squirrels, crows and juncos.

An online search revealed the belted kingfisher is the only member of that family found in the Northwest, and the beauty in my yard looked nothing like it. After more poking about I made a positive identification: Steller’s jay. Its behavior was blue jay-like – bold and taunting but nervous and revved-up, given to quick, jerky motions. Take a look at the Steller’s jay page at All About Birds, maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The second photo, near the bottom, resembles the bird I saw.

Whitman writes: “And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me.” His use of “gamut” is musically precise. In English the word dates from the early 16th century and originally meant the “lowest note in the medieval musical scale.” Within a century the figurative sense of "entire scale or range" of anything is first recorded. Like Whitman, the bird has had no formal training in making songs but “trills pretty well.”

Whitman goes beyond mere Romantic appreciation of organisms as varied as a black laborer, oxen, ducks, a jay and a bay mare; he projects himself into these beings, becomes them in all his polymorphous perversity. When I look at the Steller’s jay, I’m moved most by its difference from me, and the remarkable variation among species. I understand the ultimate commonality of the gene pool, the fractional but all-important difference between chimpanzees and homo sapiens, and I’m proud of my other primate cousins, but I cherish our difference more than our likeness. When I hear the raucous call of the Steller’s jay, I think not of Whitman but Wallace Stevens, a line from “Madame la Fleurie”:

“It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.”