The poet and the knife-grinder

Abstract

Walt Whitman’s short poem ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’ describes an encounter on a Manhattan street with a knife-grinder who ‘works at his wheel sharpening a great knife’: the ‘sparkles from the wheel’ form the knife-grinder’s song. The poem, with its narrator observing a group who are watching the knife-grinder’s magical performance, circles back to Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’, with which I began. But the way the narrator places himself in the scene, the description of the old man at work, and the implied politics of the urban landscape are all radically different. In the knife-grinder’s long literary and visual history, there are very few images that ennoble his ‘art’, and some that carry the darkest intimations of violence. Whitman deliberately refrains from investing the knife-grinder with attributes ‘above his station’. What is transcendent is not the knife-grinder himself, but his utterance—matched by that of the poet.