There were twelve poems that the young Walt Whitman compiled in his notebook in 1859.
Numbered from I to XII, they make up a love story in free verse.
She tells of longing and encounters, of loss, loneliness and happiness found again.
A headline that seems strange at first glance connects this cycle with an image of nature that couldn't be more American: "Live Oak, with Moss".
The evergreen live oak with its hard, shimmering leaves is just as much a part of the landscapes of the American South as the "Spanish Moss" growing on it, whose long hanging hair blows in the wind.
For Whitman, both become symbols of the intertwining of loneliness and community.
He had already chosen a botanical image as the title of the book of poems, the first edition of which had appeared four years earlier and which he continued to write throughout his life, in rings that grew from edition to edition: "Leaves of Grass".
The blades of grass that Whitman saw growing free on the prairie and merging into an immeasurable whole are his cipher of a democracy of the free and equal - and a poetry meant to speak and celebrate it, in the words of one individual, in the name everyone spoke.
Whitman himself never published the Live Oak cycle.
It was only in 1953 that the American philologist Fredson Bowers rediscovered it.
Whitman included all twelve poems in the "Leaves of Grass" a year after they were written, but revised them and scattered them between other poems in such a way that the connection was no longer recognizable;
he omitted two in the following editions.
The concern that he might have gone too far with his homoerotic insinuations was too great.
Laughing with the waters
The first edition of the Leaves had been lauded in Washington;
the first words here are likely to allude to this.
As the prophetic "singer of the states," Whitman saw himself celebrated in the capital, a fulfillment of his wishes.
And yet the joy at the beginning of fame is immediately discarded, as is the joy at all successful plans in general: As if all of this were ultimately just a stale substitute for that happiness in existence that the following verses describe with infectious enthusiasm.
The moonlit night and the morning light, the air, the water, the earth, the electrifying energy of one's own body, which Whitman praises in a more famous poem as "the body electric": It is the elemental forces of life that surround the ego of these verses and feels in himself, "laughing with the waters".
The key that gives him access to this wonder of the world is the nearness of the beloved;
Sea and sand "congratulate" him on this happiness.
If one were looking for an equivalent in German poetry for the experience that Whitman's verses revolve around, one would most likely find it in the poetry of the young Goethe.
Nature also shines wonderfully for Whitman's loving wanderer, he too hears the water whispering blissfully in the moonlight, while and because he is “holding a friend by the bosom”.
And like Goethe's Ganymede, he too sees himself surrounded on all sides by a landscape with which he is united in an embrace like Zeus with his beloved shepherd.
In fact, Goethe was one of the inspirers of Whitman's poetry, even if he later denied this in poetic patriotism ("Our road is our own").
Mediated first by the widespread enthusiasm for Goethe in mid-century America, then by his intellectual mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman came to know the poetry of Goethe - or recognized in him what determined his own experience.
His poetic May Festival unfolds in sweeping, free long verses, in upper and lower case that is unconcerned with grammatical rules, alternating between pathos and parlando.
Like so many of Whitman's poems, this one is so simple and clear that it's easy to overlook his musical eloquence.
And his life philosophy vigour.
After all, it's about nothing less than the question of when he was "really happy", "really happy".
In the published version, Whitman weakened this formulation.
It's really all about everything here: body and soul, love and nature, deceptive and real happiness.