The First Dandelion was published in the long-gone New York Herald on March 12, 1888.  By a stroke of ill luck, the very next day, March 13, 1888 was the day the famous “Blizzard of ’88,” which is still considered the NYC blizzard to end all blizzards…although, of course, 132 years later there is no one alive who actually saw it.   But most of New York’s worst blizzards seem to come in March or even later, so it shouldn’t have been a great surprise.

However, according to the notes on this poem in the Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org), “The snow-bound took their ire out on Whitman in poems of their own: ‘The First Blizzard,’ Signed ‘After Walt Whitman,’ appeared in the Herald on 14 March…[and] a note from the Buffalo Express on 18 March, which explained how New Yorkers passed their time during the blizzard: ‘by printing poems of Walt Whitman’s on such seasonable themes as “The First Dandelion.” We join Walt in admiration for dandelion salad.”

Whitman, Walt. “The First Dandelion.” 12 March 1888. Ed. Susan Belasco, assisted by Elizabeth Lorang. The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 14 May 2020. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.

I love Walt Whitman and wanted to put something by him on the Poetry Stand, but as a rule, Whitman did not write short poems. And his long ones are hard to excerpt in any way that makes sense. This short poem was eventually later added to the collection, Leaves of Grass.

The First Dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close

emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics,

had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—

innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful

face.

Whitman’s long poems are rich and magnificent torrents of words and images.  I’ve never been sure whether my favorite is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, a long meditation on the death of Lincoln and the death of a loved one in general, or Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, another meditation on the disappearance of a beloved and the universal presence of death.

Yet for all that, Whitman was anything but gloomy, and instead is famous for the ecstatic, over-the-top tone of his poetic reflections. Even in themes such as New York City, a place he lived in and loved and thus a frequent theme, he found a note of stunned wonder at the richness of it all.

A good YouTube of Marvin Miller, probably the world’s best reader of Whitman, can be found here:

The video was made by a creator who animates photos of long-gone poets and makes it appear that they themselves are reading their poems. Personally, I found this a little unnerving and I couldn’t watch much of it, although it was well done. But it’s worth it for the reading, which is taken, hissing and all, from an old vinyl recording of Marvin Miller reading Whitman’s poems.