Patrolling Barnegat by Walt Whitman |
|
This guide will help you study the poem, which is a set text for GCSE English literature. Move your mouse over an item in the list on the left and you will see the feedback in the box on the right side of the window. |
|
|
|
|
Download or play the poem as an mp3 file; a Real Audio file. |
|
This guide will help you study the poem. Move your mouse over an item in the list on the left and you will see the feedback in the box on the right side of the window. |
|
WILD, wild the storm, and the sea high running,
Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,
Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,
Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,
Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,
On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,
Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,
Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,
(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)
Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,
Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
That savage trinity warily watching.
Walt Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892. He was one of ten children and was born on New York's Long Island. He worked as a printer, teacher and property speculator. In 1855 he published 13 poems in a collection entitled Leaves of Grass. Over the years, Whitman published fresh editions of this collection, the last one in 1892, each time adding many more poems - eventually it would contain hundreds of poems and some 10,500 lines, making Leaves of Grass the length of a good sized novel.
Whitman set out in Leaves of Grass to write about himself, giving his purpose as:
"a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America"
During the American Civil War (1861-1865) Whitman served as a nurse in a military hospital, where he caught an infection that weakened him. In 1873, Whitman moved to Camden in New Jersey (inland from Barnegat), where he stayed until his death. Whitman published other books, but his reputation rests almost wholly on Leaves of Grass.
Patrolling Barnegat (according to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume 16: Early National Literature) was first published in The American in 1880 and reprinted in Harper's Monthly in 1881. By this time, Whitman was settled in New Jersey, where Barnegat lies on the coast in what is today called Ocean County. The title is also "corrected" to the standard UK form - Whitman writes "Patroling" with one "l".
This poem comes from a section of Leaves of Grass called Sea Drift - containing poems, inspired by the sea, which explore the mysteries of life and death. It contains two of the most famous of all Whitman's lyrics - Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life.
Barnegat is on the Atlantic Coast of south New Jersey (between Atlantic City and Jersey City). The wild sea that Whitman describes now draws sailing enthusiasts to Ocean County. Barnegat is on the coast - some way inland lies Camden, where Whitman lived from 1873 until his death. By a curious coincidence, since 1996, Barnegat Bay has been protected as one of the USA's estuaries of national importance - having been nominated for this by a state governor called Whitman.
We are not told who is "patroling" but assume that it is the poet, late at night. The poem is almost a list of details, each line ending with a verb. Mostly these suggest strong physical action or vivid details. It is not clear whether the "dim, weird forms" are natural features, ships or people - but there is a clear sense of nature as massively powerful, threatening man's precarious existence.
Whitman suggests the idea of evil spirits by describing the wind as "shouts of demoniac laughter" and seeing "waves, air, midnight" as a savage "trinity" (three-in-one) - an image that appears twice. His readers would compare this to the Holy Trinity of Father (God), Son (Jesus) and Holy Ghost (Spirit).
He shows the reader how the person "patroling" cannot be sure what is happening out at sea - by the final reference to "dim, weird forms" and earlier in the questions about "that in the distance". Is it "a wreck" and "is the red signal flaring"?
Nearly all of the poems in Leaves of Grass are written in free verse - that is, without formal patterns of rhyme or metre. Sometimes this gives us little more than chopped prose - prose broken into lines. This poem has a more clear structure - like Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse, and the later poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lines fall into two halves, each containing two stressed syllables.
The other formal feature is more obvious - each line finishes with a verb ending in "-ing". This is the form called the present participle. This means that the whole poem, set out as a single sentence, does not at any point have a main finite verb.
(Silly people might say this makes it "ungrammatical" or that Whitman uses "bad" grammar. And you would not want to risk writing like this in an exam, unless you could convince the examiners that you had a good reason for doing it. The first chapter of Dickens' Great Expectations also contains a "sentence" with no main verb. These are examples of artistic licence - if people think you know what you are doing, you can break the rules in some kinds of writing activity.)
Whitman uses effects of sound - particularly
He combines both of these effects with repeated use of the sibilant "s" sound - which may resemble the sound of the surf breaking and falling back. (You don't need to know these technical names but you should be able to find examples of them in use and explain how they work in the poem - you should do this before writing or speaking about the poems for assessed work or an exam.)
Among the other technical effects Whitman uses are:
This is a very suitable text for dramatic performance. It is easy to learn by heart or to learn for reading from a script. A pair or small group could share the lines and provide suitable sound FX - using voices only or musical instruments. In a teaching group, the listeners could provide storm noises. If your school is near the sea or a river estuary, it might be possible to do this outdoors - though probably it would not be sensible to do this at midnight in a real storm. More sensibly, pupils could make an audiotape, CD or digital recording for a computer to record the performance, or use presentation graphics software (such as PowerPoint™) to accompany a performance of the poem.
Find out about Barnegat by researching Web sites - there are lots, including sites for New Jersey State or for Ocean County and its sailing clubs. Using the information that you find, try to write one or more of the following: