Thoughts on As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life by Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass
Today, I began a two-day break from my journey with Homer and his Iliad. The next couple of days I will spend the vast majority of my reading time with other poets and their works. While not on the “sea” but at the “gulf” off the Florida panhandle, I will wander across the literary plains to the northeast of our famed poet Walt Whitman. While I have not read all of Leaves of Grass, I have intentionally strolled through the individual “blades” in a random and non-methodical manner. I have simply turned to them in a posture to receive the joy which they possess and desire to share in the fragrance of their florescence.
I enter currently into the “area” of this outstretched plain known as the Sea-Drift cluster, a collection of Walt’s poems that seem to utilize the beach to reflect on life, death, and the “old mother” ocean. I chose to read “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” as I sit on a shore some 1,000 miles or so from where Walt would have looked out, but surely, I’ll visit some of the same inward landmarks.
While Walt visits his “ocean” in the autumn of the year, I find myself at my water’s edge in the dead of winter but certainly the coolness of the air is closer than the seasonal planet position of this poem, and I too shall gaze “off southward.” I too can reflect on my day and the stroll I took with the “sound of breaking waves the other side of me” in a similar manner as he, a “self seeking type.”
I too today have “inhale(d) the impalpable breezes that set in upon me” as this stretch of water “so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer.” I too may end my day as Walt melodically expresses: “I perceive I have not really understood anything, not a single object, and that no man ever can.” Perhaps this is the gift of such confession—not ignorance as defeat, but ignorance as invitation. If we believe we have understood all, we close ourselves to the endless revelation that life offers. Whitman’s humility here becomes a kind of spiritual courage, a willingness to remain perpetually open to wonder.
May I allow myself to consider, as Walt shares, “I too am but a trail of drift and debris.” Far from diminishment, there is quiet dignity in this acceptance of our place within the larger currents of existence. We are fragments, yes, but fragments that have been touched and shaped by forces far greater than ourselves. And this brings me to one of the poem’s most tender gestures: “Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love.” Let me understand this not merely as physical embrace, but as the meeting of our deepest selves through language and presence. Our lips are where words pour forth—where love becomes audible, where grace finds voice. When God loves us through His word, He invites us into relationship; so too should we love our neighbor with our words, speaking truth and tenderness into the lives we encounter.
As Walt reminds us in his patient meditation on mortality and meaning, we are each washed ashore by forces we cannot fully control, yet in that very ebbing and flowing, we find connection to something eternal and sustaining.
May these thoughts be as consoling and uplifting to you as they have been to me at the closing of this day.