Riddle Song - Whitman - Riddle Revealed

Riddle Song - Walt Whitman

Hidden in the first four lines of this Walt Whitman poem is a jewel that you may not recognize at first. Please read the poem first, then tell me what "IT" is. Hint: Chicken of the Sea and the mermaid granting you a wish. Hint 2. She is Vishnu's Consort Lakshmi. What is the thing you must find in this life? Whitman answers it for you in the first four lines. I'll give you hints until the end.



THAT which eludes this verse and any verse,
Unheard by sharpest ear, unform’d in clearest eye or cunningest mind,
Nor lore nor fame, nor happiness nor wealth,
And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the world incessantly,

HINT; You only need these four lines to see it. What is the heart to your life? You can't hear or see or even touch it.

Which you and I and all pursuing ever ever miss, 5
Open but still a secret, the real of the real, an illusion,
Costless, vouchsafed to each, yet never man the owner,
Which poets vainly seek to put in rhyme, historians in prose,
Which sculptor never chisel’d yet, nor painter painted,
Which vocalist never sung, nor orator nor actor ever utter’d, 10
Invoking here and now I challenge for my song.

HINT: Vouchsafed means reserved as a gift and given freely. Do you own this threasure? Did it cost you anything?

Indifferently, ’mid public, private haunts, in solitude,
Behind the mountain and the wood,
Companion of the city’s busiest streets, through the assemblage,
It and its radiations constantly glide. 15

HINT: You find it everywhere, yet you cannot see it apart from its action.

In looks of fair unconscious babes,
Or strangely in the coffin’d dead,
Or show of breaking dawn or stars by night,
As some dissolving delicate film of dreams,
Hiding yet lingering. 20

HINT: When a person dies, you remember it as a memory. Where does it hide? Can a memory such as Life ever die? The illusion is only allusion.

Two little breaths of words comprising it.
Two words, yet all from first to last comprised in it.

HINT: Go back to the first four lines. Two breaths of words. ALL seek it, yet already have the treasure in hand.

How ardently for it!
How many ships have sail’d and sunk for it!
How many travelers started from their homes and ne’er return’d! 25
How much of genius boldly staked and lost for it!
What countless stores of beauty, love, ventur’d for it!
How all superbest deeds since Time began are traceable to it—and shall be to the end!
How all heroic martyrdoms to it!
How, justified by it, the horrors, evils, battles of the earth! 30
How the bright fascinating lambent flames of it, in every age and land, have drawn men’s eyes,
Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the islands, and the cliffs,
Or midnight’s silent glowing northern lights unreachable.

HINT: How many people work their fingers to the bone to find the very thing they fail to value. Always given freely, yet the greatest treasure when found. What is IT?

Haply God’s riddle it, so vague and yet so certain,
The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it, 35
And heaven at last for it.

HINT: Each of the four lines above starts with a letter. TUNA. Four letters.

4TUNA - Fortuna - Lakshmi is the consort of Vishnu, or the Goddess Fortuna. She is the Ruach Elohim of Genesis 1 and the Holy Spirit of LIFE. She is the Womb and Feminine Generative Principle. She is LIFE itself for all who realize.

Your Fortune is Life. Don't miss it. Love those who share in your gift. Now, go back and read the poem. For added effect, play the video below as you read.

Finding life is realizing the CUP, the Grail of a Holy Spirit. Virtue is Love and Love is virtue. All of creation for you!

Fortuna (Latin: Fortūna, equivalent to the Greek goddess Tyche) was the goddess of fortune and personification of luck in Roman religion. She might bring good or bad luck: she could be represented as veiled and blind, as in modern depictions of Lady Justice, and came to represent life's capriciousness. She was also a goddess of fate: as Atrox Fortuna, she claimed the young lives of the princeps Augustus' grandsons Gaius and Lucius, prospective heirs to the Empire. WIKIPEDIA

Lakshmi (Sanskrit: लक्ष्मी, lakṣmī, ˈləkʂmiː) is the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity. She is the wife and shakti (energy) of Vishnu, a major god in Hinduism.[2] Lakshmi is also an important deity in Jainism and found in Jain temples.[3] Lakshmi was also a goddess of abundance and fortune for Buddhists, and was represented on the oldest surviving stupas and cave temples of Buddhism.[4][5] In Buddhist sects of Tibet, Nepal and southeast Asia, goddess Vasudhara mirrors the characteristics and attributes of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi with minor iconographic differences.


WORDS to Carl Orff - O Fortuna

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.

Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.

Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!

What is the answer to the lament in the song, reflecting a celebration by Whitman? Is there a paradox? Where is freedom found in life? What is the purpose of fate and our fortune when found? WIKI