And it's now that I want to read this fragment from Whitman's
Song of Myself, because in a way,
he made the question one that one had to in some way face.
He takes Plato's ladder, so-called ladder of love,
which is set forth in the symposium where Socrates
describes what his teacher Diotima told him
about love, how it moves from various particular things
to the general upward and upward,
until finally love is directed toward the absolute.
And Whitman takes the ladder and simply turns it around
and walks down it without in any way
decreasing the sacredness of what he finds at the end.
On the contrary, giving to the lowliest things
the sacredness Plato didn't think they have.
I want to read this particularly because
for a Michael Hogan who's here, and who I just discovered
this afternoon also loves Whitman as I do,
and for his son Gary, who before I read
came up and hugged me to give me the strength to read.
Whitman says, loaf with me on the grass,
loose the stop from your throat.
Not words, not music or rhyme I want,
not custom or lecture, not even the best.
Only the lull.
Only the lull I like, the hum of your velvet voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, how
you settled your head athwart my hips
and gently turned over upon me, and parted
the shirt from my bosom bone and plunged
your tongue to my bare-stripped heart
and reached till you felt my beard,
and reached till you felt my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge
that pass all the argument of the Earth,
and I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own,
and I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
and that all the men ever born are also my brothers,
and the women my sisters and lovers,
and that a kelson of the creation is love,
and limitless are leaves stiff or drooping
in the fields and brown ants in the little wells beneath them
and mossy scabs of the worm fence,
heaped stones, elder, mullein, and poke-weed.