Six Children
‘Though unmarried I have had six children’
Walt Whitman
The first woman I ever got with child wore calico
In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze
I caressed her loins, until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow.
The second was braving the tumultuous seas that encircle
This fish-shaped isle; by the time a sudden rip-tide tore
Her from my grasp, she had known the full power of Paumanok.
One matron I waylaid – or was it she who waylaid
Me? – on a tram that shook and rattled and
Rang from Battery Park to Washington Heights and back.
O Pocahontas! You died as Rebecca Rolfe, and are buried
In Gravesend. Your distant descendant, her swollen belly
Taut as a drum, avoids my eye, and that of other men-folk.
While my glorious diva hurls her enraptured soul to the gods,
I sit, dove-like, brooding in the stalls: what in me is vast,
Dark and abysmal, her voice illumines and makes pregnant.
Some day, all together, we will stride the open road, wheeling
In an outsized pram my sixth, this broken, mustachioed
Soldier whose wounds I bind up nightly. His mother I forget.
-Mark Ford From Six Children (2011)
Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1962, and is a professor in the English Department at University College London. His Selected Poems was published by Coffee House Press in 2014. Other publications include Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2001), Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (2016), Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry (2023), and three collections of essays, the most recent of which, This Dialogue of One, was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is the editor of London: A History in Verse and of the ongoing Library of America edition of the poems of John Ashbery.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Seven): Mark Ford
Mark Ford’s brilliantly imagined soliloquy/monologue by Walt Whitman, its catalyst a simple but scandalous statement by the erstwhile “good gray poet” (the title of a pamphlet by William Douglas O’Connor) transforms sentimental notions of Whitman’s saintliness to a more complex, fraught persona. It’s as though Ford’s preparation for writing the poem included Whitman’s poem, “Are you the new person drawn toward me?” which starts, “To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose. . . .”
“Six Children” embodies Whitman’s impulse to tally. The “29th Bather” section of “Song of Myself,” in which a lonely woman peers out from her curtained room at 28 joyful male bathers, gets some of its power from enumeration. To count a group of people objectifies it, supplies a firmer presence. Calling the woman the “29th Bather” renders the poem poignant. Her fantasy is given numerical actuality yet remains unreal.
Here, enumeration seeks to make the “six children” more real. But, in a wonderfully oblique move, the poem actually enumerates—till the very end—their mothers, turning Whitman’s confession into a demonstration of his prowess as seducer. Whitman’s wording in the epigraph, “have had,” rather than “have” is telling. The children are not a family. They are productions.
Of course, Whitman will be Whitman, and his descriptions of sex veer toward the mythic. Take the first stanza:
The first woman I ever got with child wore calico
In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze
I caressed her loins, until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow.
What a rich welter of contrasts, both jarring and enthralling. The woman is humbly dressed; lives in a state named for a great king. She is “hoeing beans”—the humblest of crops. The poet descends on her in a breeze, the effectiveness of his caress of her “loins”—descriptor fallen from fashion, but always used more for men than for women —demonstrated abruptly and wonderfully: “until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow,” “the furrow” underlining the woman’s fertility and echoing the shape of her sex.
Mother number 2 is ravished by forces much more boisterous: the rip-tides surrounding “fish-shaped” Long Island, named by its original people “Paumanok.” Whitman has, in one leap, arrogated the powers of an ocean and of an aboriginal island in support of his virility, so encompassing that it escapes even his control as “a sudden rip-tide” tore / her from his grasp.” Does she drown before ever giving birth? This doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is the impregnation, instinctively known to our W. W, his initials a wingspan.
One matron I waylaid – or was it she who waylaid
Me? – on a tram that shook and rattled and
Rang from Battery Park to Washington Heights and back.
Mother number 3, a more mature “matron,” perhaps waylays the waylayer—in a much more profane setting, “a tram that shook and rattled and / Rang,” as if itself enacting orgasm. We have been delightfully wrenched from the mythic to the real, complete with place names and itinerary. Ford’s poem is becoming a compendium of Whitman’s attitudes and imagination, with the mythic and the ordinary on familiar terms. (For another wonderfully comic combination of transit with intercourse see the scene in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in which the novel’s heroine and her lover, Leon, consummate their affection while being driven endlessly in a carriage. We know this only through increasingly exasperated exchanges between Leon and the driver.)
The description of Mother number 4 plunges us back into the mythic with the ejaculation, “O Pocahontas!” then back to the sad facts of the real: “You died as Rebecca Rolfe, and are buried / In Gravesend.” This solemnity segues to Rolfe’s descendent, whose drum-like “taut belly”—presumably the result of lovemaking with our poet—connects her with indigeneity. Sadly, she seems to be ashamed—a fact our speaker comments on but does nothing to alter, as if merely witnessing a sort of tableau vivant.
Mother number 5, operatic, is Whitman’s “glorious diva,” who in an amazing turnabout, ravishes the poet with art’s unsounded obscurity:
While my glorious diva hurls her enraptured soul to the gods,
I sit, dove-like, brooding in the stalls: what in me is vast,
Dark and abysmal, her voice illumines and makes pregnant.
This stanza, the poem’s most formally and sonically Whitmanesque, shows us our poet at his most sublimely ridiculous: “. . .dove-like, brooding in the stalls. . . .” All along, perhaps, Whitman himself has been the mother of his children, his poems! And the female principle, wrapped in art, their father! If this sounds polymorphously perverse, it is.
We have been warned. “Six Children”’s final stanza continues to reveal dissonant elements of Whitman’s character and his art. In perhaps too-hasty optimism, our poet, having adopted the energetic future tense, declares that “Some day, all together, we will stride together the open road”—the “we” seeming to refer to the magisterial poet and his sixth child, the one child we actually see, whom he trundles in a “outsized pram’: a “broken, moustachioed soldier whose wounds I bind up nightly.” This Beckettian vision is our Whitman’s final and most accurate version of his ideal fatherhood, an amalgam of father and lover witnessed in the poems of Drum-Taps, where Whitman ecstatically ministers to ravaged combatants of the Civil War, children he apotheosizes. (As Kurt Vonnegut has said, “Every war is a children’s crusade.”) Does “all together” include the mothers? Us? How “open” is the road? The soldier/son’s wounds seem permanent, bound “nightly,” their only treatment a continued confinement.
Was this son perhaps the father of George Whitman, eccentric and generous proprietor, for many years, of a Paris bookstore named in homage to Sylvia Beach and her legendary store; who claimed to be Walt Whitman’s illegitimate grandson? Perhaps a silly question, but I believe that this poem, like Whitman’s own poetry, encourages us to mix the poetic with the factual, that which is “under our boot soles.”
The poem’s final stroke is the blunt “His mother I forgot”—a statement that seems to swallow not just this mother, but all the mothers who have gone before her. “Six Children,” through poetry’s alchemy, gives us the poet in his most and least alluring guises, loosing, as in “Song of Myself, “the sound of the belch’d words of my voice . . .to the eddies of the wind.” Mark Ford makes it our privilege to experience Whitman’s spirit here, re-imagined in all its bedraggled majesty.
-Angela Ball
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