`What Salutes of Cannon and Small Arms!'

One-hundred fifty-four years ago today, Walt Whitman published 12 untitled poems and a preface in an edition of 795 copies at a Brooklyn print shop owned by two Scottish immigrants, the brothers James and Andrew Rome. Within two weeks Emerson, one of Whitman’s many inspirations, praised Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” In later editions, Whitman mentions Independence Day – the birth of the nation, the birth of his book -- in “Song of Myself,” Section 15, near the conclusion to one of his catalogs, this one celebrating Americans of every stripe, from opium-eater and “quadroon girl” to the president:

“The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground...”

My favorite among Whitman’s evocations of July, without mention of the national holiday, can be found in Specimen Days, “A July Afternoon by the Pond”:

“The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color’d dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?)—the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes—occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by—the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade—the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)—then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek—(what was the yellow or light brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch’d legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, and free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call `shoals of mackerel’—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?”