Whitman’s W.Va. poem
“All ages are contemporaneous in the mind.”
– Ezra Pound
If you know anything about the rest of this Walt Whitman/W.Va. story, please comment or fire off an e-mail to me; it has been in the back of my mind for almost 40 years.
When Walt Whitman was a young man, he wrote a poem called “Isle of La Belle Rivière” on Blennerhassett Island in West Virginia. Edgar Lee Masters wrote in his book “Whitman” that the poem was written in 1848 but wasn’t published until April 30, 1892, in the Cincinnati Post.
“Isle,” as it was published in the Post, was preceded by the following:
“Parkersburg, Va., April 30– (Special.) — It is well-known that the late Walt Whitman made a pilgrimage down the Ohio Valley in the year 1849; that he stopped on Blennerhassett Island for a brief season (a spot almost world-famous in song, story and history as the home of the exiled Blennerhassett, and as the scene of Aaron Burr’s machinations for the destruction of this Republic); that he drank from the historic old well of Blennerhassett, and that he retained pleasant recollections of his pilgrimage long afterward.
“What is not so well-known, in fact, if it is scarcely known at all, that he composed a characteristic poem while on the visit to the old island which appears in the Post for the first time. The original draft of this poem was left at the home of Whitman’s entertainer, old Farmer Johnson, who then lived on the island. The poet took a copy, and the Post representative has a copy of the original, so that these three are the only known copies of the poem in existence, if indeed the copy which Whitman took exists anywhere….”
Robert Rogers Hubach, an English professor who has written much about the good gray poet, says Whitman was traveling from Brooklyn to a newspaper job in New Orleans at the time “Isle” was written. Turns out, Whitman held the job only about 3 months — he had a conflict with his employer — before he went back North. On the way to New Orleans he traveled by stage coach to Wheeling, W.Va., where he descended the Ohio River. He stopped in Cincinnati and also spent some time in a hut on Blennerhassett Island and wrote a poem about the island. Many readers and scholars have made note of “Isle” too, but if there is even a shred more to the story, let’s have it.
Here’s the poem:
Isle of La Belle Rivière
Bride of the swart Ohio;
Nude, yet fair to look upon,
Clothed only with the leaf,
As was innocent Eve of Eden.
The son of grim old Alleghany,
And white-breasted Monongahela
Is wedded to thee, and it is well.
His tawny thighs cover thee
In the vernal time of spring,
And lo! in the autumn is the fruitage.
Virgin of Nature, the holy spirit of the waters enshroud thee,
And thou art pregnant with the fruits
Of the field and the vine.
But like the sabine maid of old,
The lust of Man hath ravished thee
And compelled thee to pay tribute to the
Carnal wants of earth.
Truth and romance make up thy
Strange, eventful history,
From the eye of the red man;
Who bowed at thy shrine and worshiped thee,
To the dark days of that traitor
Who linked thine innocent name to infamy,
Farewell, Queen of the waters
I have slept upon thy breast in the innocence of a babe,
But now I leave thee
To the embraces of thine acknowledged lord.
At Blennerhassett–Aged 30
– from “The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman: Much of Which Has Been But Recently Discovered,” by Walt Whitman, published by Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921
