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Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860
Walt Whitman is about forty. He has spent years walking New York, riding the ferries, and watching the people around him.
He has already published a strange, enormous book of poems. In 1860 he puts out a new edition, and in it is a short poem about something that happens to nearly all of us and that almost nobody writes down.
A stranger passes him in the street. That is the whole event.
They do not stop. They do not speak. There is no introduction, no name, no letter afterward.
As they pass each other, he feels as if he has known this person all his life. He does not even say whether it is a man or a woman, and the poem does not care.
What he decides to do about it is the reason I copied it out.
“I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”
Look at the word to.
I am to wait. Not I will wait, not I would like to, not I suppose I might.
That is the grammar of orders. It is how a sentry is told where to stand, and he has turned it on himself.
Now listen to me. We are told, constantly, that a want with no plan attached is foolishness.
That if he did not stop the stranger, the stranger is lost. That if you did not say it at thirty, or forty, or fifty, the door closed behind you and you should be sensible now.
He did not stop the stranger. He did not speak, and he still writes, in plain words, that he does not doubt they will meet again.
Do not skim past do not doubt. He has no evidence at all.
A face on a sidewalk, gone in a second. And he does not doubt.
This is not hope, because hope leaves itself a little room to be wrong. This is a man assigning himself a post.
I think you have a post. Something, or someone, you have never said out loud, that the people around you have quietly decided you are too old to still be watching for.
He would not tell you to give it up. He would tell you that standing still is not the same as giving up.
And then the last line. I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
Read that again, slowly. The stranger is already gone, and he takes responsibility for not losing them anyway.
Keeping a want alive is work. It is not the absence of action, it is the action, and he made it his job in ten lines.
This poem is a hundred and sixty-six years old. It costs nothing, and almost none of us were ever handed it.
Underneath it I wrote
I am still at my post, and I have stopped calling it foolish.
Today. Copy the last three lines of the poem by hand, slowly, in ink if you have it. Underneath, write one line of your own that begins with the words I am to. Do not show it to anyone today.
What I wrote that year
In March of the year I could not write, I copied a page of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South every evening. For the first week I put nothing underneath it at all.
Then one night I wrote two words. "Not yet."
I wrote the same two words under the next page, and the next, for nine evenings running. I thought I was admitting defeat.
I can see now that I was keeping my place.
