Compost-Based Poems

When students are studying ecology, Walt Whitman’s poem “This Compost” can bring some fresh air to the subject.

Any good poem resembles a biosystem in that its survival depends on the interrelationships of its parts—on context. A good poem seems to us a world in itself. The poet weaves with words a network of semblances and distinctions, as nature does. One of Walt Whitman’s famous remarks (in Leaves of Grass) is: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Whitman recognizes, and brings us to recognize, that it’s only natural to combine forces that, according to any simplistic notion, don't combine. In “This Compost,” Whitman combines rot and beauty, death and life, but expressed in terms of immediate facts rather than high-flown abstractions.

Read the poem aloud to your class, with rhythm and energy. (You might ask students to note their favorite phrases, and ask for them afterwards.)

THIS COMPOST

1.

Something startles me where I thought I was the safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea.
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with the sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d.
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2.

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit in their nests, 
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this was no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. 

The poem begins with nameless fear; then we find the cause: the foulness and decay that feeds the earth. But Whitman lets "melons, grapes, peaches, plums” grow out of it, “and all is clean forever and forever.” 

Note Whitman’s long, rolling lines (the nineteenth-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called his work “prose bewitched”). In the way he combines prose qualities and poetry, basic fact and strange music, his writing is like nature—full of surprises, not oversimplified. Point out some of his most unusual or strongly expressed parts to your class. 

The central shock of the poem is that life rises out of “ugliness.” However, Whitman doesn’t start the poem with big ideas. He shows us emotion and the things it connects with; then and only then he lets the ideas arise, out of these details. Poets usually work like this—from the thing to the thought, not vice versa.

You might also want to discuss Whitman’s fear of natural poisons and its relation to our own present-day fears of poisons of our own making. 

Ask your students to write a poem in free verse, not necessarily in Whitman’s style, based on some harshness, threat, or “corruption” in nature. Perhaps their poems can “rise,” as “This Compost” does, to praise nature, but this should never be forced, and need not happen at all.

Collect and read, or ask the students to read their own.

See also: USING GREAT POEMS AS MODELS.

AN ODE TO ALLERGIES

I grope my way
to the medicine
cabinet
behind the mirror
Sine-aid Sudafed
Contac Dristan
Drixoral Bendedryl
Allerest Actified
down a double dose
I feel like Betty Ford
allergies
forsake me please
and leave
yesterday
eight sneezes
in a row
(someone said
you die
after seven)
if it’s the
devil inside
that I’m
letting out
(I don’t expect you
to bless me
each time either)
I’d rather
be possessed
than congested
why I don’t 
dare smell
daisies or roses
that poisonous
pollen will
penetrate
my nasal passages

fall is not
falling fast
enough
enough enough
of these
respiratory
embarrassments
and Mother Nature
you’re not helping
by refusing to rain
instead whipping
that dreadful
yellow film
off spruce pine
aspen oak
ragweed
and cottonwood
into your
once winsome
now wicked wind
alleviate this
atopy idoblapsis
anon
these purple
crescents beneath
my eyes
are rather
unbecoming
there’ll be no
romping and rolling
in a golden field
for me
it’s intoxicating
in more than
one way
I’m afraid

ACHOO
that’s it
I’ve had it
I’m heading
west
to the coast
to recapture
the rapture
of the
sea
set sail
on the Pacific
a mistress
of the open
land is
in sight
out of reach
of anything
green
or germinating
call me on
the marine radio
when at last
the first snows
fly and the
dour dust
the frigging flour
of flowers
that damn plant sperm
is finally
frigid in winter’s
grasp.

Rebecca Bush (college)

SLEDDING

Sledding down the snowy slope suddenly
I find the tip of my nose froze
in the cold weather looking
down at the world but only finding
the deep dream
had been far away without me knowing
what was happening “BOOM”
There I go into a tree ouch
I was almost crying
for it had hurt I was moaning
trying to hold it back
but all of a sudden
it came out exploding into the air.

Shawnee Black (6th grade)

THE WOODS

Deanna Smith (6th grade)