If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
He is accused by the hawk, and he is the hawk. He is under your bootsoles, and he is over the roofs of the world. You in the future may not know who he is or what he means, but he will be in your very bloodstream.
Dickinson takes what seems to be a different view of the poet, and of how poetry works across the generations. Her image is not the voice of a swooping hawk, but a lamp, even a part of a lamp. But her terrain, like Whitman's, expands to the largest proportions and her vision too extends into the future:
The Poets light but Lamps --
Themselves -- go out --
The Wicks they stimulate --
If vital Light
Inhere as do the Suns --
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference --
Dickinson's "vital Light," like Whitman's "good health to you nevertheless," projects itself beyond mortality. You could argue that of the two she makes the grander claim: Whitman shakes his white locks at the runaway sun, whereas Dickinson imagines a genuine poem ("If vital Light") emulating the sun, with a radiant optical precision, infinitely enlarged. Both poets, in their radically different manners, declare that the poem endures on an immense scale -- and yet lives on an intimate scale in the reader.
(Section 52 of "Song of Myself" can be found in the Norton Critical Edition of "Leaves of Grass." Copyright © 1965 by New York University, 1973 by Norton. "The Poets light but Lamps -- " (#883) can be found in "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson," edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.)
