Poem: A Clear Midnight

A Clear Midnight

THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou

lovest best.

Night, sleep, and the stars. 

Walt Whitman’s poem, “A Clear Midnight”, is the final poem in the section “From Noon to Starry Night” in the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass (1881). The poem is brief by Whitman’s standards – a single sentence comprised of only forty-two words. It is only four lines long: one quatrain. And yet it enacts a threshold experience, a visionary crossing, an incantation that delivers a sense of overpowering spiritual immensity.

Midnight is the moment of transition from one day to the next.  Whitman uses this moment as a metaphor for the transition from corporal existence to spiritual existence. The midnight described by Whitman is more than a mere moment of transition – the poet shows us a clear moment.  Nothing is hidden, nothing impairs the passage; there is nothing to fear. 

Whitman's poem exemplifies the correspondence between our inner and outer worlds. It is all about transport, about the imagination in cooperation and harmony with the universe. Whitman seems to address his soul to achieve that harmony. This is a dramatic utterance, but it is also a conjuration. Whitman is playing a magician to his own soul on our behalf. The real addressee of the incantation is the reader who exists on the distant horizon of the poem. I cannot help but feel that one part of the poem’s meaning is that the reader, too, has an imperishable soul. The poem wants to trigger that soul to dwell on the eternal. It would release something wordless and equivalent into any of us who read it.

“A Clear Midnight” is above all a comforting poem, depicting a natural transition from corporeal existence to spiritual existence.