by Mindy Misener
My new favorite poem—admittedly, the rankings change often—is Walt Whitman’s “This Compost.” These days, I cling to it as I would a life raft. Here’s why.
In the first line, the poet finds himself “[startled]… where I thought I was safest” and withdrawing from the natural world he loves. The reason? Essentially, because he is meditating on the rot and the illness, actual and figurative, of Earth. “Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?” he asks. “Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
The last time someone used the word distemper with me, they were describing a vaccination schedule for my cats. Distemper is, in the veterinary sense, a highly contagious viral disease marked by fever and cough. It is also, in its archaic sense, used to describe political disorder. As a verb it means to throw out of order. It can also mean, simply, a terrible mood.
Distemper is all too fitting word for our times.
Whitman, like any poet worth their salt, doesn’t simply hammer one idea. He sees where the idea takes him; he follows its lead. Next he meditates on the way “this compost”—even the “distemper’d corpses”—breed new life, and argues that “The summer growth is innocent and disdainful” of all the heartache and loss and pain that has preceded it. This thought actually makes Whitman
…terrified of the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions…
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.
This last stanza really resonates. Some pains are so old and dark, others so fresh and aching, it seems impossible they would ever become anything else—it seems like “this compost” all around me is and will only be rot forever. So to look at the evidence of new life, a new cycle, another try, can be unsettling. Maybe this is what the ancients meant when they talked about the “fear of the Lord.” It’s not necessarily pleasant to find the Lord’s goodness where we think we shouldn’t. Sometimes it can even feel wrong.
I think it’s okay to feel afraid or upset or even angry about God’s goodness, which doesn’t make sense and never has. I also hope that when the moment is right, we will remember again how deep and wide and everlasting is that which sustains us. We will remember that something keeps pushing green plants through sidewalk cracks. Something sends flowers into a burned area. Something meets us wherever we are and says, “The story is still unfolding.”
— Mindy Misener teaches creative writing at Montana State University
and serves as Pilgrim's 2021 stewardship chair