After spending about two years wending my way through Kent’s copy of Whitman I’ve been hopping from book to book trying to figure him out. Michael Robertson’s Worshipping Walt draws portraits of several people who saw Whitman’s work as more than poetry. The poems were a new prophecy, a new Bible, and Whitman the founder of a new religion. In my reread of Leaves of Grass I certainly saw Whitman as a mystic. The oneness of everything, and so forth. Even Whitman’s long catalogs of occupations and landscapes made sense that way, a mote as godly as a cathedral, a workman as holy as a prostitute, men on high barely hinted at.
Horace Traubel was a neighbor boy during Whitman’s years of fading health in a house in Camden, New Jersey. Traubel conceived an early fascination and became a regular visitor, eventually appointing himself Whitman’s biographer, sometime nurse and steadfast moral support. Traubel took voluminous notes of their conversations which he turned into books, although some of those books were published long after Traubel died. (The ninth volume of With Walt Whiman in Camden didn’t appear until 1996.)
In the years after Walt Whitman’s death Horace Traubel tried his best to spread the word, to keep alive not just the poetry but the myth, the spirit, the religion that was Whitman. Traubel himself seemed to have a magnetism that helped keep the project going.
Today’s phrase struck me because I am a widow. I could guess what the phrase meant from context. But I couldn’t guess why. The person quoted is a visitor to the Traubel household, Traubel and his wife were frequent hosts to friends and Whitman enthusiasts. As the day wound down, few packed up and left, it seems.
word: widow’s cruse
context:
“‘[W]e knew that [AnneTraubel] had gone to superintend the preparation of supper for which every one hoped he would be bidden to remain. Bidden or unbidden, every one stayed as a matter of course, and Mrs. Traubel’s larder always appeared to have the best qualities of the widow’s cruse, though the poor lady could never be sure in advance whether four or fourteen would sit down to supper. Hospitality of the best sort was Horace Traubel’s sole dissipation.’”
definition (Merriam-Webster): an inexhaustible supply
The bare definition isn’t enough, is it? Thus we move down to the etymology: from the widow's cruse of oil that miraculously supplies Elijah during a famine (I Kings 17:8–16)
A cruse, for those, like me, who haven’t seen the word before is a small vessel (such as a jar or pot) for holding a liquid (such as water or oil).
The miracle sounds similar to the Hannukah one, wherein a small amount of lamp oil lasts longer than it really ought to. But at this point I’ve given you enough to (a) lecture me on my ignorance, (b) push on to your own research, or (c) nod and move on.
source:
Worshipping Walt: the Whitman disciples
by Michael Robertson
2008. Princeton University Press, Princeton
