My Doubts

Wow!

That will be fun!!!


"The silent cyclic chemistry" refers, I think, to the cycle of the land nurturing plants and, thus, animals, and then reabsorbing them into itself and being nurtured and fertilized itself.

I do wonder if the word echoes "alchemy" here?


The chemistry refers to the chemical reactions as the cycles of nature repeat themselves, I think.


Chemistry was a relatively new science in Whitman's time, and would have been an exciting science. I wonder if it might have been normally thought of in terms of the steel smelters and other huge manufacturing processes of the day, and thus a word very evocative of power and wonder in the context in which it is used?


Actually, as I read on, about "The rich ores forming beneath", I wonder if he is thinking of the massive chemical processes of the formation of the earth's crust itself? He is a poet likely to have such a sweep of thought.


It is interesting that he sees the preceding eons to white Americans' discovery of the land as a form of the land lying fallow until such as he discover and utilise it!

To him it was. And he was quite justified to believe it. Why not? This sense of pioneership, regardless of other issues, is both new and old in all of our cultures. I quite appreciate it.



Cyclic chemistry... um.. I am thinking of a scene of constant formation and reformation.

I think I am bit by bit drawn into Dickens now. I quite frequently marvel at his humor, his way of presenting and portraying people and events.

Foremost of all, I feel something resonant, something empathic. Although the book was written by one who was long dead, the spirit of the book reflected something always about youth. There in the book lies a constant theme of "Division". Division of two opposing attitdes, division between Pip's unquieted yearning and wistful bond to the place where he was born.
Then, something that never dies in human stories gradually emerge from the mists...

This division made the book suddenly lively in front of me.

Curiously enough, my reading of Great Expectations is punctuated by James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. And these two are much alike in the their stories of youth. (Personally I like Joyce still better)

Thus my overall sentiment when midway through Great Expectations.

JB

From two very different ages, are they not?


I loved "Portrait" when I read it.

I feel similar :wink:

Both on, what's that word, "rite of passage"? Or more accurately, Self-realization.