Youth in the Homestead

Specimen Days: The Maternal Homestead

Whitman logs the memories stirred in his mind when he visits the site where his mother's home and where he spent a good portion of his childhood in. He finds it mostly gone, with only a few remnants left, over taken by grass and weeds. Many generations lived in that home, seems like 3 or 4, so it's interesting to note that it stopped at Walt's generation.

The image of the 29th bather comes to mind, yearning to swim with the 28 men in her home. The home could somehow represent the confines of the woman, that have finally been torn down and all who inhabited the place are now dead, bathing with the others, or swaying in the wind in the very blades of grass and weeds that grew over the place.

The memories Whitman recalls seem very romanticized. His grandparents take an archetypal characters: the jolly grandfather and the sweet old grandmother... The lineage of horses raised with the family... It makes me think of how we tend to gloss over our memories of childhood and associate them with 'better times' or 'ignorant bliss.' Maybe the house represented some sort of innocence for Walt that is now shattered in adulthood, metaphorically represented by the run down house, even the 'copious old brook and spring... have mostly dwindled away.' This is a theme Whitman explores throughout all of his poetry, and seems to be a great hardship in his life, the losing of innocence. America, as a country, seemed to have gone through that phase during Whitman's lifetime as well... trying to unite and ignoring the problems of the times, but couldn't and broke out in a civil war. America too yearns for those simpler days, which probably never existed in either case, Whitman or America or for anyone in fact, it's just that shield youth brings about that what is truly missed.