The Little Black Boy

So I am in the car, in traffic trying to get home. I have just spent my whole weekend stuck in school, on a leadership retreat. I am absolutely exhausted thinking on Leaves of Grass and on what I was going to write my blog on. I then looked out the glass car window and saw a black, little kid he was doing real hard work. I had no words to describe what he was doing, his face, his actions, movements. I once again closed my eyes. I arrived home, with the image of this little kid in my head. I turned on my computer and opened Walt Whitman’s poem, Leaves of Grass. I started reading poem 11, 12, and couldn’t find anything to write about but then I got to poem 13; the first 5 lines made the image of the black little boy arise to my mind once again.
“The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses—the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain;
The negro that drives the dray of the stone-yard—steady and tall he stands, pois’d on one leg on the string-piece;
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens over his hip-band;
His glance is calm and commanding—he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead;
The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache—falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs.” (Poem 13. Lines 1-5)

Walt had the perfect description; it was simple, concrete, direct, and complete. I felt in the place of these two characters, poems do something, something that you cannot experience by yourself, not even through your eyes. It makes you have a focus, it does not permit you to wonder all around. He describes everything that he is seeing in a subtle and simple way.

Then Whitman ends this poem by
“And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,

And consider green and violet, and the tufted crown, intentional;

And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else;
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me;

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.” (Poem 13, lines 19 - 23)

Here he is repeating what he wants to say. Adding and adding more necessary detail to form a complete image in your mind. When reading poems readers like to not only read, but to see, feel, smell and these are two passages in Whitman’s poems that show different ways of forming images.