"I close my eyes and this image floats beside me
The sweaty-toothed madman
with a stare that pounds my brains.
His hands reach out and choke me
And all the time he's mumbling,
Mumbling truth,
like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold.
You push it, stretch it, it will never be enough .
Kick it beat it, it will never cover any of us.
From the moment we enter crying,
to the moment we leave dying,
it will just cover your face
as you wail and cry and scream."
This third and last installment of the homage to Whitman is not actually a poem written by him, but rather a scene from the movie “Dead Poets Society”.
And it is actually one of the most important scenes of the movie. For those who have not seen it, Todd Anderson is one of the students at Professor Keating´s course. He is terribly shy and timid, the mere thought of speaking in public, in front of his classmates, scares him and paralizes him. Keating tries to draw him out of his shell by having him come to the front of the classroom to “sound his barbaric yawp” and keeps on irritating him until passion takes over and poetry just seems to “flow” from him. The boy comes up with the poem above while looking at a portrait of Whitman (who therefore becomes the actual “sweaty toothed madman”). This seems to me a particularly appropriate choice: poetry in Whitman is pure passion, and here this passion is used as a catalytic to help the child conquer his innermost fears.
A further, very interesting exploration of the meaning of this scene can be found at the Antiromantic.com website. Here, the author explains how the poem “could be a symbol for the attempt to balance romanticism and rationalism. Truth being a blanket that only covers you partially always keeping your feet cold. No matter how you stretch it one way or the other something is exposed. The feet are symbolizing Todd's rationalism and the head represents his romanticism. As his rational side was the one that had always won out before, that was the one most exposed to criticism, thus being cold. I would argue that Todd slowly throughout the movie began to cover more of his rational side and uncover some of his romantic side in an attempt to balance the two."
