MURIEL!

Well, I'm glad I read about the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster prior to reading the poem or else I would haven't known about that.  That being said, the speaker of the poem, it seems, is trying to steer the reader in a certain direction.  Just looking at the first five stanzas, there is a lot of talk about roads, cities, places to go, things to do, as if the speaker is telling the reader where to go, what to do.  Knowing about the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster it makes perfect sense.  Muriel specifically says, "This is a nation's scene and a halfway house."  She calls it a halfway house!  She uses the word "you" and "your" a few times in the first five stanzas as well.  I think this establishes a relationship that says that the speaker is speaking for the reader, as if it were the reader's own thoughts.  Or maybe the speaker is going so far as to persuading the reader that this is what they are thinking by saying "you" and "your."  Unlike Walt's poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", Murile uses the words "we" and "us."  Walt uses the word "I" a lot, thus separating the speaker and the reader.  The ending of Muriel's poem seems pretty positive considering that one stanza that goes, "all these men cry their doom across the world, meeting avoidable death, fight against madness, find every war."  She uses words such as open, desire, beginning, and ends the poem with unending love.  I think this speaks to some sort of feeling of regeneration or at least that one can occur if people are open to it.  Interesting how this poem is about the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster when just about a year later World War II happens.  I think you could almost read parts of this poem as a WWII poem.

What am I going to do?!

Since I have decided to pursue the changes Walt has changed throughout the different editions of Leaves of Grass, I'm going to have to do more research.  I've decided to stick with the poem Song for Occupations since I am familiar with that, and I also really liked it.  Some questions that I have in mind that I would like to find the answer to, how much influence did publishers have on Walt?  Did he really want to make all those changes?  And for what purposes were those changes made?  There will never be a set answer just because I can't ask Walt himself, unless a Oiji board really does work and will allow for a long explanation.  But I think the research would be quite interesting.  I would obviously read more Specimen Days posts as well as do more research on America at that time and the publishers.  I'm sure Walt did what he wanted with his poems but at the same time you can't help but think his readers influenced him somewhat.

Now, the main question. How am I going to present this?!  There are two ways that I was thinking about, a story or a set of poems.

For the story, I was going to write a narrative with either a reader during Walt's time or a publisher.  If these people read Leaves of Grass in the 1860's and saw the changes right then and there, what was their reaction and even interaction with other people and Walt himself!  That is more of a creative writing assignment, one in which fiction would come into play.

The second being a set of poems.  I'm not much of a poem writer but have been writing silly ones with a friend of mine.  I thought that maybe I could do the opposite of Walt.  He was so into free verse, no constraints!  I could present evidence through poems with some sort of rhyme and meter.  I have never really done anything like this before, unless you consider rhyming cat and hat and bat and mat in high school.